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The parent is trolling. "Logic language" is not a well-defined term, and it is not even commonly used for anything, as far as I know. The term usually applied to Prolog is "logic programming language". The parent's definition of "logic language" seems to be something like "a theorem prover's input language". Prolog is not that, but nobody claims that it is.



I am not trolling, and I am insulted that you would insinuate that. I'm offering an alternative categorization of Prolog which I have found, over a decade of using Prolog, to elucidate its pragmatic difference from languages which more directly reflect the sort of first-order logical reasoning for which @wruza wishes Prolog would see more use.


To be clear, it's not trolling to point out that theorem provers are also a good choice for reasoning tasks of this kind.

In my opinion it is trolling to repeatedly insist that Prolog wants to be a theorem prover but fails. And to obfuscate this by not using the term "theorem prover" for the kind of tool you have in mind, and to use the non-standard term "logic language" instead.


Your claim is that I'm deliberately obfuscating terminology in order to… help someone on Hacker News understand why lists and finite structure are useful in Prolog? Push an agenda to kick Prolog out of the logic language club? Stir up animosity in the language crowd of HN? Sorry, I'm not following.

Doesn't the simpler explanation, that I made up a term that tries to capture the idea I'm trying to communicate, and didn't define it precisely because it's an HN comment and not a research paper, make more sense?

(Not that "theorem prover" is the correct term. That describes a tool, not a language.)

Can you propose a better term to describe a language for expressing logical statements than "logic language"?




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