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Some Thoughts on How to Teach Prolog

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Prolog: The Next 50 Years

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

Abstract

Prolog, and (Constraint) Logic Programming in general, represent a unique programming paradigm. Prolog has many characteristics that are not present in other styles of programming, and this is one of the reasons why it is taught. At the same time, and precisely because of this uniqueness, teaching Prolog presents some special challenges. In this paper we present some lessons learned over many years of teaching Prolog, and (C)LP in general, mostly to CS college students, at several universities. We address how to show the beauty and usefulness of the language, and also how to avoid some common pitfalls, misconceptions, and myths about it. The emphasis of our discussion is on how, rather than what. Despite some focus on CS college students, we believe that many of the ideas that we propose also apply to teaching Prolog at any other education level.

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 on previous drafts of this paper.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See https://cliplab.org/logalg for a collection of our teaching materials. We would like to thank the many contributors to these materials which have influenced this paper, including Francisco Bueno, Manuel Carro, Isabel García Contreras, Daniel Cabeza, María José García de la Banda, David H. D. Warren, Ulrich Neumerkel, Michael Codish, and Michael Covington.

  2. 2.

    See also other papers in this volume, which address the subject of teaching Prolog to school children [2, 3, 19].

  3. 3.

    A historical note can be useful at this or a later point, saying that this materialization was done by Colmerauer (with colleagues in Marseilles and in collaboration with Kowalski and colleagues in Edinburgh) [4, 14], and was made possible by the appearance of Robinson’s resolution principle [18], Cordell Green’s approach to resolution-based question answering [7], the efficiency of Kowalski and Kuhnen’s SLD resolution [12], Kowalski’s combination of the procedural and declarative interpretations of Horn clauses [11], and the practicality brought about by Warren et al.’s Dec-10 Prolog implementation [17, 23].

  4. 4.

    The directive (an expansion) activates breadth-first execution, which we find instrumental in this part of the course; see also the discussion in Sect. 3.

  5. 5.

    See also [21], in this same volume, for an ample discussion of how to build programs inductively.

  6. 6.

    See also the discussion in Sect. 3 on termination, the shape of the tree, search strategies, etc.

  7. 7.

    And even some LP languages have been proposed that explicitly did not have an operational semantics, such as, e.g., the Goedel language.

  8. 8.

    Clicking on the links is perfectly safe!.

  9. 9.

    See also [1], in this same volume, for another interesting example which can be used similarly.

  10. 10.

    E.g., in Ciao Prolog, in which we have added over time a number of features to facilitate teaching Prolog and (C)LP, one can for example use to run all predicates breadth-first. Also, many Prologs have tabling nowadays.

  11. 11.

    https://prob.hhu.de/w/index.php?title=Why_Prolog%3F.

  12. 12.

    An interesting topic that is however out of our scope here –let’s just say for this discussion that they used “something similar to Erlang.”

  13. 13.

    https://cliplab.org/logalg.

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Authors and Affiliations

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

    Manuel V. Hermenegildo & Jose F. Morales

  2. IMDEA Software Institute, Madrid, Spain

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

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

    Pedro Lopez-Garcia

Authors
  1. Manuel V. Hermenegildo
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  2. Jose F. Morales
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  3. Pedro Lopez-Garcia
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Correspondence to Manuel V. Hermenegildo .

Editor information

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. (2023). Some Thoughts on How to Teach Prolog. 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_9

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