Yes, I know, this is Haskell list. So, I apologize, but not too much... Johan Grönqvist cites me:
Anyway, I believe strongly that ALL people who have problems... should be encouraged to learn Prolog. IN DEPTH,
Do you have a recommendation on how to do this? (e.g., books, web-pages, (available) lecture notes, problem sets)
First, install a decent Prolog on your machine. There are plenty: http://kti.mff.cuni.cz/~bartak/prolog/implementations.html http://www.cs.cmu.edu/Groups/AI/html/faqs/lang/prolog/prg/part2/faq-doc-2.ht ml You may wish to install the free version of Visual Prolog. My favourite is the SWI Prolog: http://www.swi-prolog.org/ (University of Amsterdam) The documentation is complete, and the reference manual contains references to such standard books as ClocksinMellish, or Sterling&Shapiro. The last one is very, very instructive. Also, Prolog Programming for Artificial Intelligence, written by Bratko, is very useful. There are on the web collection of examples from this book, don't remember where. Try here: http://promethee.philo.ulg.ac.be/engdep1/download/prolog/bratko/ On-line there are thousands of examples, tutorials, etc. J. Fisher: (There is an example of cut, especially for A. Coppin) http://www.csupomona.edu/~jrfisher/www/prolog_tutorial/contents.html others: http://www.coli.uni-saarland.de/~kris/learn-prolog-now/lpnpage.php?pageid=on line http://computing.unn.ac.uk/staff/cgpb4/prologbook/book.html http://www.cs.nuim.ie/~jpower/Courses/PROLOG/ Etc., etc. Really! Examples. For example: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~lloyd/tildeLogic/Prolog.toy/Examples/ http://kti.mff.cuni.cz/~bartak/prolog/learning.html http://www.visual-prolog.com/vip/example/ and of course there are discussion lists, FAQs, etc. Ask Google... =================== Andrew Coppin writes:
I did once try to learn Prolog. And failed. Miserably.
I just couldn't bend my head around how the Prolog interpreter manages to > make seemingly "impossible" leaps of deduction. (It's a *machine*! How can > it deduce arbitrarily complex conclusions from any arbitrary set of axioms? That requires *intelligence*!) And yet, in other, seemingly identical cases, it utterly fails to deduce patently *obvious* results... really weird!
One of standard exercices in Prolog is the construction of the meta-interpreter of Prolog in Prolog. While this is cheating, I recommend it to you. It opens eyes. Actually, there are three basic items to learn while trying to master Prolog after having dealt with the syntactic essentials term construction, and the like. 1. The unification, which shows the "ultimate" instance of pattern-matching and is useful for recognizing some techniques for the automatic inference of types in functional languages. 2. The usage of unbound "logical variable", which sometimes permits to to do things which require laziness in Haskell. 3. The control backtracking, which is at the heart of the logical non-de- terminism. Now, the non-deterministic algorithms in Haskell are usually implemented using the *data backtracking*, or the List Monad. The control backtrack, via, say success/failure continuations, is more difficult, they are rarely taught, and problematic because of strong typing. Prolog strategies are straightforward, and I simply cannot understand the comments of Andrew Coppin. Which arbitrary set of conclusions?? Which patently obvious results not derivable?? Be kind, give some examples, otherwise people may suspect that you are issuing vacuous statements... The best. Jerzy Karczmarczuk