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Types, Modes and so Much More – The Prolog Way

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Prolog: The Next 50 Years

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNAI,volume 13900))

Abstract

We present in a tutorial way some ideas developed in the context of the Ciao Prolog system that we believe could be useful for the future evolution of Prolog. We concentrate primarily on one area: the use of assertions with types, modes, and other properties, and how the unique characteristics of Prolog have made early advances possible in the area of combining static and dynamic language features. However, we also address briefly some other issues related to extending the expressiveness and functionality of the language.

Partially funded by MICINN projects PID2019-108528RB-C21 ProCode, TED2021-132464B-I00 PRODIGY, and FJC2021-047102-I, by the Comunidad de Madrid program P2018/TCS-4339 BLOQUES-CM, and by the Tezos foundation. The authors would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers for very useful feedback.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    The examples are runnable in the Ciao playground ; they have been developed with version 1.22 of the system. Screenshots are from the Ciao Prolog Emacs interface.

  2. 2.

    Due to space limitations we present the assertion language through –hopefully intuitive– examples. More complete descriptions of the assertion language can be found in [2, 12, 29].

  3. 3.

    See, e.g., [43] in this same volume for an introduction to modes.

  4. 4.

    Note that while, as mentioned before, the assertions in Fig. 4 use modes they are represented internally in normal form and the popup message uses syntax close to this form, where the computational properties and the state properties that must hold upon success are split into separate (comp and success assertions respectively).

  5. 5.

    An upper bound [26, 35] is also inferred, equal to the lower bound (Fig. 17).

  6. 6.

    See again [43] for in introduction to term expansion in Prolog.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universidad Politécnica de Madrid (UPM), Madrid, Spain

    Manuel V. Hermenegildo, Jose F. Morales & Manuel Carro

  2. IMDEA Software Institute, Madrid, Spain

    Manuel V. Hermenegildo, Jose F. Morales, Pedro Lopez-Garcia & Manuel Carro

  3. Spanish Council for Scientific Research (CSIC), Madrid, Spain

    Pedro Lopez-Garcia

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  1. Manuel V. Hermenegildo
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  3. Pedro Lopez-Garcia
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Correspondence to Manuel V. Hermenegildo .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY, USA

    David S. Warren

  2. Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada

    Veronica Dahl

  3. TU Wien, Vienna, Austria

    Thomas Eiter

  4. Universidad Politecnica de Madrid/IMDEA Software Institute, Madrid, Spain

    Manuel V. Hermenegildo

  5. Imperial College London, London, UK

    Robert Kowalski

  6. IBM Research, Yorktown Heights, NY, USA

    Francesca Rossi

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Hermenegildo, M.V., Morales, J.F., Lopez-Garcia, P., Carro, M. (2023). Types, Modes and so Much More – The Prolog Way. In: Warren, D.S., Dahl, V., Eiter, T., Hermenegildo, M.V., Kowalski, R., Rossi, F. (eds) Prolog: The Next 50 Years. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 13900. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-35254-6_2

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