IPL: Interfaced Prolog/Lisp

This thesis report describes the design and implementation of an interface between the two most common artificial intelligence languages, Lisp and Prolog. The interface is accomplished by small extensions to each language, and provides Prolog programs with the capability of invoking Lisp functions. The interface is simple yet powerful; it the supports passing of arbitrarily complex data objects, regardless of data type. The particular language implementations extended were C-Prolog [Pereira,85] and XLISP [Betz,86], both interpreters running under the Unix operating system

FIT-PROLOG : a functional/relational language comparison

The programming languages FIT and PROLOG are compared as examples of functional and relational programming, respectively. This leads to some proposals concerning both languages. As an introductory tutorial, PROLOG facts, questions, variables, conjunctions, and rules are reformulated in FIT. A natural equivalence between functions and relations is exploited for their interchangeable FIT use. An ESCVAL operator is proposed which causes relation calls to return values of request variables and thus permits their function-like nesting. Function calls with request variables are introduced, showing a sense in which FIT functions are more general than PROLOG relations. Higher-order functions and relations are demonstrated to be available in FIT but not in PROLOG. PROLOG structures and FIT compounds differ mainly in the fixed arity of the former and the variable length of the latter. FIT's compounds can also be interpreted as function calls that return themselves in normalized form. Pattern matching in PROLOG [FIT] treats list heads and tails asymmetrically [symmetrically] and doesn't [does] allow for non-deterministic results. While PROLOG generalizes pattern-data matching to pattern-pattern unification. FIT generalizes it to adapter-data fitting. PROLOG's Horn clauses in FIT become implicit fitters: Facts become special implicit adapters and rules become special implicit transformers; for PROLOG II constraints, transformers with LOCAL bodies or invocation adapters with COM[POSE-TRA]FO expressions can be used. While PROLOG interprets clauses in textual order, FIT interprets them in a specificity order which is modifiable by a SECURE operator. Although PROLOG's cut operator is not used in FIT, a proposal is made to distinguish the specification of clause ordering [by FIT's SECURE operator] and the specification of clause abandoning [by an EXCLUSIVE operator corresponding to 'initial'-restricted cuts]. EXCLUSIVE-marked COMFO-constrained rules are then used for functional and relational representations of guarded commands. A comparison of the list processing capabilities of both languages exemplifies how FIT's adapters can make relational programming more concise than PROLOG’s Horn clauses. The representation of sets as lists without duplicates leads to difficulties with PROLOG's standard intersection and union predicates, which can be overcome by representing them as the self-normalizing CLASS data structure in FIT. Possible reasons for the poor readability of Warren's PROLOG serialise predicate are discussed and an alternative FIT function is formulated which shows the inherent simplicity of this problem. McDermott's PROLOG quadrat predicate is transformed into a more concise and readable ESCVAL form, which in turn is transformed into a corresponding FIT ESCVAL form and into a functional FIT form. Fermat's equation is formulated relationally, showing that for principal reasons some relations can not be used in all ways allowed by PROLOG's notation, a problem that does not arise in a corresponding functional FIT formulation

Impacts of Artificial Intelligence

This book, which is intended to serve as the first stage in an iterative process of detecting, predicting, and assessing the impacts of Artificial Intelligence opens with a short "one-hour course" in AI, which is intended to provide a nontechnical informative introduction to the material which follows. Next comes an overview chapter which is based on an extensive literature search, the position papers, and discussions. The next section of the book contains position papers whose richness and diversity illustrate the wealth of opinions and research directions that today fall under the umbrella term "AI research". The papers are followed by a select bibliography containing nearly 700 books, articles, and research memoranda on AI-related topics, together with a thesaurus and KWIC index to facilitate the retrieval of information. The book closes with and index and two appendices, one listing the names and addresses of the contributing scientists and the other giving details of the AI curriculum at the University of Vienna

Prolog compared with Lisp

1.75SIGLELD:3511.638(DAI-RP--180) / BLDSC - British Library Document Supply CentreGBUnited Kingdo