6 Prolog on PCs for Chemists

Publisher Summary The chapter presents a discussion on PROLOG on personal computers (PCs) for chemists. The language PROLOG automatically keeps track of the reasoning process and backtracks automatically. It uses a simple priority scheme for the rules. The PROLOG user is relieved from the burden of keeping detailed track of the reasoning process, from the administrative atrocities of the backtracking process, and one may easily set the priority of his rules trough their sequence in the program. The PROLOG programmer supplies a description of the problem one wants to solve by specifying its components and the relations holding between them. The chapter presents a discussion on the process of specification of a comparatively simple problem in PROLOG and at the same time presents an informal tutorial-type introduction to some of the basic features of the language. The chapter presents examples, emphasizing the philosophical particularities of PROLOG as a non-procedural programming language. The examples presented do not rely on a particular implementation of PROLOG.