Qute: A Prolog/Lisp Type Language for Logic Programming

Abstract

A new Prolog/Lisp type programming language called Qute is introduced. Qute computes (partial) recursive functions on the domain S of symbolic expressions in the sense of Sato[3], Sato and Hagiya[4]. Qute amalgamates Prolog and Lisp in a natural way . Any expression that is meaningful to Qute is either a Prolog expression or a Lisp expression and a Prolog (Lisp) expression is handled by the Prolog (Lisp, resp.) part of Qute . Moreover, the Prolog-part and the Lisp-part calls each other recursively. Compared with the traditional Lisp symbolic expressions, our symbolic expressions are mathematically much neater and yet constitute a richer domain. Qute is a theoretically well-founded language defined on this domain of symbolic expressions. Many interesting features of Qute are described in this paper. Qute has been implemented on v AX/UNIX and is used to develop a programming system for proving properties of our domain of symbolic expressions.