VTechWorks staff will be away for the winter holidays starting Tuesday, December 24, 2024, through Wednesday, January 1, 2025, and will not be replying to requests during this time. Thank you for your patience, and happy holidays!

Browsing by Author "Chitale, Chandan S."

Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
  • Thumbnail Image
    Extending Prolog with type inheritance and arithmetic
    Chitale, Chandan S. (Virginia Tech, 1989-05-15)
    Prolog is a logic programming language based on first order logic. It uses resolution as a rule of inference, and unification is the heart of resolution. The unification algorithm is a syntactic process and hence attaches no meaning to function and predicate symbols. We incorporate arithmetic into unification by simultaneously solving linear equations that are created during the unification of partially instantiated numeric expressions. Prolog operates on the Herbrand universe, which is a single unstructured domain. In case of large structured domains, the number of resolution steps required for inference is large. We have incorporated type inheritance into Prolog to exploit large structured domains. Types are subuniverses corresponding to sets of objects. The subset of relation between types induces a hierarchy on the universe. Using the property of inheritance it is possible to obtain shorter proofs in inference. We used the constraint satisfaction model and the hierarchical constraint satisfaction concept to incorporate these extensions to Prolog. Thus, we succeeded in obtaining a logic programming language with arithmetic and type inheritance. This implementation extends standard Prolog and can be directly added to the WAM concept.