Seven Languages in Seven Weeks

Day 1: An Excellent Driver

In Rain Man, Raymond told his brother he was an excellent driver, meaning he could do a fine job of handling the car at five miles per hour in parking lots. He was using all the main elements—the steering wheel, the brakes, the accelerator—he just used them in a limited context. That’s your goal today. We’re going to use Prolog to state some facts, make some rules, and do some basic queries. Like Io, Prolog is an extremely simple language syntactically. You can learn the syntax rules quickly. The real fun begins when you layer concepts in interesting ways. If this is your first exposure, I guarantee either you will change the way you think or you’ll fail. We’ll save the in-depth construction for a later day.

First ...