The year the name ‘Prolog’ was officially invented in Marseilles.
1972
The full French phrase that the abbreviation ‘Prolog’ stands for.
PROgrammation en LOGique
The specific researcher who chose the name ‘Prolog’.
Philippe Roussel
The programming language used to implement the very first Prolog interpreter, Prolog 0.
ALGOL-W
The 1965 principle introduced by J.A. Robinson that serves as the theoretical foundation for Prolog.
Resolution Principle
The specific subset of first-order logic that can be executed efficiently and is used in Prolog.
Horn Clauses
The restricted form of resolution demonstrated by Robert Kowalski that treats logic clauses as procedure definitions.
SL-resolution (or Linear resolution with Selection function)
The researcher who formulated the famous equation $Algorithm = Logic + Control$.
Robert Kowalski
The primary control strategy used in the first Prolog interpreter, chosen due to memory constraints of the time.
Depth-first search with backtracking
The most recently officially recognized core ISO standard for Prolog, published in 1995.
ISO/IEC 13211-1:1995
The powerful formalism used in natural language processing that was formally standardized in June 2025.
Definite Clause Grammars (DCGs)
The implementation version of SWI-Prolog mentioned as the latest stable open-source release.
Version 10.0
The 1973 prototype (Prolog I) that first introduced this operator for control.
Cut operator (!)
The dialect released in 1982 that replaced standard unification with equation solving over infinite (rational) trees.
Prolog II
The first system to fully realize the vision of Constraint Logic Programming (CLP) in 1990.
Prolog III
The dialect that established the standard “Edinburgh Syntax,” including capitalized variables.
DEC-10 Prolog
The first version of Prolog designed specifically for 8-bit microcomputers using Z80 Assembly.
LPA Prolog (or micro-PROLOG)
The abstract memory model and instruction set that modern Prolog implementations like SWI-Prolog are built upon.
Warren Abstract Machine (WAM)
The primary programming language used to implement the SWI-Prolog virtual machine for portability.
C
The specific classification of SWI-Prolog that refers to its ability to modify its own database at runtime.
Dynamic language
The initial motivation for developing Prolog was for general-purpose computing.
False (The initial motivation was the processing of natural language)
Alain Colmerauer is widely recognized as the creator of Prolog.
True
In Kowalski’s $Algorithm = Logic + Control$ equation, the logic component is the strategy used to solve the problem.
False (The control component is the strategy used to solve it)
SWI-Prolog version 10.0 introduces native GUI tools based on SDL3 and Cairo.
True
