by Joshua Smith
Prolog is not like any other language you are likely to come across. It is a logic driven, declarative language that has been around since the 70s. It is not OOP nor purely functional, and though it has influenced many languages it never really got popular outside of Japan. That's the bad news and most people stop here. However, the good news is that Prolog allows you to attack certain problems in an elegant and succinct way. Prolog and Prolog-like languages have found use in a variety of AI, scheduling systems, and the semantic web. This presentation is directed at novice Prolog programmers and people who may have never seen prolog. Prolog has very little syntax (more than Fourth, less than Ruby) and so that part is easy (you'll get a handout). The hard part of Prolog is that it's so different. We will cover the basics of Prolog and work our way up to a simple expert system. We will also cover how to use Prolog to consume and provide web services using the LGPL'd SWI Prolog.