Why Prolog? Justifying Logic Programming for Practical Application

**Why Prolog?** presents a timely, presents a timely, comprehensive, and stimulating explanation of Prolog's capabilities. With a clear and simple example-oriented style, author Gregory L. Lazarev describes the power of this exciting language and its theoretical foundations, and provides numerous "real-world" applications—designed to save time, money, and improve productivity!

Among the significant features of **Why Prolog?** are the following:

- illustrates the problems associated with conventional computing and offers a list of requirements necessary for their resolution;
- presents Prolog's declarative and procedural interpretations along with typical data structures;
- discusses the advantages of Prolog for software development, including clarity, simplicity, conciseness, and consequential productivity improvements;
- details implementation of conventional techniques in Prolog and Prolog's extensions, including interfaces with procedural languages such as C;
- explores Prolog's practical advantages in such diverse areas as databases, problem solving, natural language, and software engineering;
- describes the role of Prolog in knowledge representation schemes;
- stresses the importance of Prolog's metaprogramming capabilities;
- provides several case studies demonstrating why Prolog was chosen and how it was used in implementation of real-world applications;

The fundamental features of Logic Programming, an overview of the Japanese Fifth-Generation Computer Project, and a list of current Prolog implementations and their features can be found in the appendices.