Welcome to The Prolog Implementers Forum!

[ Any comments? Please post them at the Prolog Community Implementers Forum Discourse. ]

Why this forum?

The Prolog implementer community is very lively, with about a dozen Prolog systems that are currently supported, most of which are under active development. This represents a major strength of Prolog and has resulted in many new features added to Prolog systems, including rich support of constraint-based reasoning, tabling, program analysis, multi-threading, probabilistic reasoning, multi-paradigm extensions, and much else. However, there are also drawbacks. No single Prolog fully supports all of these features, and when they are supported, the features may have different APIs making porting from one Prolog sytem to another more difficult than it could be. The forum is aimed at building consensus on these issues when possible or at least documenting the current status and the reasons behind the different approaches.

PIPs

A major task of the Prolog Implementers Forum is the discussion about and development of Prolog Improvement Proposals (PIPs). PIPs describe important extensions to ISO-Prolog systems that are not (yet) included in the Prolog ISO standards. These extensions may affect the Prolog language itself or they may be implemented as libraries or packages.

While PIPs describe important functionality, they are not standards. They are intended to describe functionality implemented in current Prologs rather than to prescribe what all Prologs should do. Each PIP must be supported by at least two Prolog systems. The objective is to foster coordination among Prologs in developing new functionality, and in providing common APIs to existing functionality. In addition, if a PIP is widely adopted by the Prolog community it is probably a clear candidate to be developed into an official standard by the appropriate working groups.

For more information please visit the PIP pages of this site.

Other activities

The forum also organizes workshops aimed at Prolog development coordination.


The Prolog Implementers Forum is a part of the "All Things Prolog" online Prolog community, an initiative of the Association for Logic Programming stemming from the Year of Prolog activities.