Things have moved on since 1994, not only can you still embed it in C and a load of other languages, you can even run it directly in your browser as there's a WASM port.
Extending C with Prolog (1994)
21–29 of 29 posts
Re: Extending C with Prolog (1994)
#22I started using Prolog in my self written home automation system over 20 years ago. At first I was using CORBA and I linked ACE/Tao into SWI-Prolog so that Prolog could catch and send CORBA messages. That worked for years but was too annoying to add new message types since a wrapper had to be written for each, plus threading had to be coordinated between C++ and Prolog. Eventually I ditched the CORBA stuff and switch…
This sounds really cool and I am glad that Prolog has outlived CORBA
Yeah, CORBA really needed to go away.
Re: Extending C with Prolog (1994)
#23I often wonder what a Prolog implemented as an Objective-C like extension to C would look like. Since WAM has proper stack and heap IIRC, it might be possible to plug that in through some region-based memory management on C side. Is there some prior art like this?
I ported from Pascal to C a Lisp interpreter system that had an embedded Prolog in it (that used Lisp syntax) (and wrote a new memory subsystem) in my spare time in College. Later I helped a grad student a little bit with their implementation of a Warren machine (runtime for a Prolog compiler) for it. That’s the only embedded Prolog I’m aware of.
Re: Extending C with Prolog (1994)
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
Refreshing stories between all the AI ones (and crypto/web3 before that)
You said AI: https://github.com/stassa/louise Louise (Patsantzis & Muggleton 2021) is a machine learning system that learns Prolog programs. Louise is a Meta-Interpretive Learning (MIL) system. MIL (Muggleton et al. 2014), (Muggleton et al. 2015), is a new setting for Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) (Muggleton, 1991). ILP is a form of weakly-supervised machine learning of logic programs from examples of program beh…
If we're going down that path: Ehud Shapiro got there back in 1984 [1]. His PhD thesis is excellent and shows what logic programming could do (/could have been).
He viewed the task of learning predicates (programs/relations) as a debugging task. The magic is in a refinement operator that enumerates new programs. The diagnostic part was wildly insightful -- he showed how to operationalise Popper's notion of falsification. There are plenty of more modern accounts of that aspect but sadly the learning part was broadly neglected.
There are more recent probabilistic accounts of this approach to learning from the 1990s.
... and if you want to go all the way back you can dig up Gordon Plotkin's PhD thesis on antiunification from the early 1970s.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algorithmic_program_debugging
Re: Extending C with Prolog (1994)
#25> We recently installed Gateway multi-media kits on our PCs, but found the installation less than trivial because of conflicts in our interrupt (IRQ) channels. A simple expert system could have helped to resolve those IRQ conflicts. ... The sample program is set up to allow installation of two different devices, a 'Sound Blaster' and a 'Mitsumi CD- ROM'. This was a real blast from the past. I wonder why more systems…
Pepperidge Farm remembers when reasoning systems could actually reason, instead of backing out the part of the context they're told is erroneous, appending "Wait..." and then continuing to predict tokens as before.
Re: Extending C with Prolog (1994)
#26I often wonder what a Prolog implemented as an Objective-C like extension to C would look like. Since WAM has proper stack and heap IIRC, it might be possible to plug that in through some region-based memory management on C side. Is there some prior art like this?
I ported from Pascal to C a Lisp interpreter system that had an embedded Prolog in it (that used Lisp syntax) (and wrote a new memory subsystem) in my spare time in College. Later I helped a grad student a little bit with their implementation of a Warren machine (runtime for a Prolog compiler) for it. That’s the only embedded Prolog I’m aware of.
Check http://t3x.org, it has some book on logic for Scheme which implements a Prolog under it wich very few files and lines per file.
Re: Extending C with Prolog (1994)
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Ironically, once upon a time Prolog and logic programming in general were part of the cutting-edge of AI. There's quite a fascinating history of Japan's fifth-generation computing efforts in the 1980s when Japan focused on logic programming and massively parallel computing. My former manager, who is from Japan, earned his PhD in the 1990s in a topic related to constraint logic programming.
I remember when so-called "expert systems" written in Prolog or LISP were supposed to replace doctors. Then came the (first) AI winter after people realized how unrealistic that was. Nowadays LLMs are supposed to replace doctors.. and that makes even less sense given that LLMs are error-prone by design. They will hallucinate, you cannot fix that because of their probabilistic nature, yet all the money in the world is…
The LLM collapse will yield the classical AI reborn with environments like Common Lisp.
Re: Extending C with Prolog (1994)
#28I started using Prolog in my self written home automation system over 20 years ago. At first I was using CORBA and I linked ACE/Tao into SWI-Prolog so that Prolog could catch and send CORBA messages. That worked for years but was too annoying to add new message types since a wrapper had to be written for each, plus threading had to be coordinated between C++ and Prolog. Eventually I ditched the CORBA stuff and switch…
This sounds really cool and I am glad that Prolog has outlived CORBA
Except that CORBA spirit thrives in 2026 still, gRPC, D-BUS, COM/DCOM, WinRT, XPC, Android IPC, SDKs over REST/GraphQL, MCP,...
Re: Extending C with Prolog (1994)
#29Windows NT used to have the network configuration run in prolog:
https://web.archive.org/web/20030218034509/http://www.resear...