The logic programming language Prolog was invented in the 1970ies by Alain Colmerauer, mostly for the purpose of natural language processing. Since then, logic programming has become an important driving force in research on artificial intelligence, natural language processing, program analysis, knowledge representation and theorem proving.
SWI-Prolog (swipl, https://www.swi-prolog.org/) is an open-source implementation of the logic programming language Prolog. Swipl targets developers of applications, with many users in academia, research and industry. SWI-Prolog includes a large number of libraries for “the real world”, for example, a web server, encryption, interfaces to C/C++ and other programming languages, as well as a development environment and debugger.
This R package embeds swipl in a package for the R programming language (www.r-project.org).
This R package is distributed under FreeBSD simplified license. SWI-Prolog is distributed under its own license (BSD-2).
Please use R version >= 4.2. The package is on CRAN, it can be
installed using install.packages("rolog") from the R
environment. The current sources can be installed using
install.packages('rmarkdown')
install.packages('remotes')
remotes::install_github('mgondan/rolog', build_vignettes=TRUE)
This takes about 20 min on my computer. Then please move on to the examples. Please note that under Windows, you need the RTools42 build system.
This is a hello(world).
R> library(rolog)
Run a query such as member(X, [1, 2, 3]) with
R>
findall(call("member", expression(X), list(1L, 2L, 3L)))
Sorry for the cumbersome syntax. At the moment, expression(X) encapsulates variables. The query returns bindings for X that satisfy member(X, [1, 2, 3]).
The second example is the vignette with nice use cases in Section 4.
rmarkdown::render(system.file("vignettes", "rolog.Rmd", package="rolog"), output_file="rolog.html", output_dir=getwd())
You should find an HTML page in rolog.html of the
current folder. Note that it includes equations with MathML, which look
best in the Firefox browser.