Integrating Prolog Into the Poplog Environment

Abstract

Although Prolog undoubtedly has its good points, there are some tasks <such as writing a s creen editor or network interface controller) for wh i ch it is not the Language of choice. The most natural computational concepts [2] for these tasks are hard to reconcile with Prolog's declarative nature. Just as there is a need for even the most committed Prolog programmer to use "conventional" Languages for some tasks, so too is there a need for "Logic" oriented components in conventional applications programs, such as CAD systems [7] and relational databases [5]. At Sussex, the problems of integrating Logic with procedural programming are being addressed by two projects. One of these [4] involves a distributed ring of processors communicating by message passing. The other project is the POPLOG system, a mixed Language AI programming environment which runs on conventional hardware. This paper describes the way in which we have integrated Prolog into POPLOG.