Hacker News Reader

Comment by keithnz | Hacker News Reader

Is there any good resources for the internals of prolog / writing a prolog interpreter?

MIT Press published a book called "The Warren Abstract Machine: A Tutorial Reconstruction" by Hassan Ait-Kaci. This short -- 114 pages -- book about the Prolog VM has been made available for free download by the author (it's out-of-print). [0]

A good description of what it's about is at MIT Press' page for the author [1].

(While out-of-print, apparently a paperback version can be had for $21 on Amazon [2]).

[0] http://wambook.sourceforge.net/

[1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/contributors/hassan-ait-kaci

[2] https://www.amazon.com/Warrens-Abstract-Machine-Reconstructi...

And, interestingly, there are Github repositories of people implementing the material in this book, e.g.:

https://github.com/rm-hull/wam (WAM in Clojure)

https://github.com/rupertlssmith/hak_wambook (WAM in Java)

Peter Norvig (of google fame) describes how to write a prolog like language in Common Lisp: https://www.amazon.ca/Paradigms-Artificial-Intelligence-Prog...

And also happens to be one of the best books ever written on computer programming.

yeah, dude is beast.

just found he has a github with the book ( in multiple formats)

https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp

Chapter 4 of "The Art of Prolog" ("The Computation Model of Logic Programs") is about that very topic. It doesn't go into gory details on how to optimize an interpreter for fast execution, but it does go into enough detail that I was able to create a Prologish interpreter in ~30 lines of Haskell many years ago. Apparently "The Art of Prolog" is a free download now (there is a PDF link on the left side of the page).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com