Programming Languages: Concepts and Implementation

14.13 Chapter Summary

In contrast to an imperative style of programming, in which programmers specify how to compute a solution to a problem, in a logic/declarative style of programming, programmers specify what they want to compute, and the system uses a built-in search strategy to compute a solution. Prolog is a classical programming language supporting a logic/declarative style of programming.

Logic/declarative programming is based on a formal system of symbolic logic called first-order predicate calculus. In logic programming, the programmer specifies a knowledge base of known propositions—axioms declared to be true—from which the system infers new propositions using a deductive apparatus. Propositions in a logic program are purely syntactic, ...