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Comment by ramses0 | Hacker News Reader

Speaking of Prolog, I often run into situations where I would love to have some semi-dialect of prolog available at runtime (ie: use regexes for simple string problems, use prologexes for simple logic problems).

Are you aware of any prolog-like languages that integrate well with other programming languages?

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TuProlog (http://alice.unibo.it/xwiki/bin/view/Tuprolog/) is a lightweight Prolog engine, written in Java, that's really easy to embed in Java apps.

I don't know of any (outside of semi-toy Prologs in _On Lisp_ and PAIP), but writing a Prolog dialect designed for embedding (in a similar manner to Lua) is near the top of my list of future projects. Prolog can be really awkward for some things (most notably IO / side effects), but for certain problems, its approach is an excellent fit.

Constraint programming (often bundled with Prolog) also deserve far more attention, IMHO.

For CP, GECODE is C++, which makes it very easy to bundle /if/ you're writing in that language.

SWI-Prolog can be used embedded - but I haven't any experience with the results.

I'm reading Guido Tack's thesis now, actually, trying to get a better sense of how constraint systems are implemented.

SWI is my usual Prolog runtime, but I haven't tried running it embedded. I really like Lua's design principle of, "The language doesn't handle this particular thing well, but since it's embedded, it doesn't need to - keep the language small". A mini-Prolog could focus on what it does best, have a simple C API, and leave the rest to the surrounding language.

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