Significant papers worth reading?

[ocharles]

Hi all,

Does anyone have any suggestions of papers or articles they think are worth reading? I've thoroughly enjoyed all of @triska's writing, and just finished a skim of "Indexing dif/2" and I'm hungry for more!

[jjtolton]

Yes indeed! It's particularly tricky because as far as I can tell there are several very distinct "schools of thought" within the Prolog community, I'm not sure if they have names or not. Personally, I think if you are going to bother doing Prolog at all, you might as well take full advantage of the declarative logic nature of the language. It seems that not every school of thought adheres too this, but from what I can determine, there seems to be no excuse for not adhering to the "monotic core".

But...

I don't know how to tell which papers adhere to that and which that don't!

That being said, here are a few papers which have been recommended to me so far over the course of Scryer discussions:

• Implementation of Continuations
• @UWN's paper on the reif concepts
• @triska 's social golf master's thesis and CLP(fd) phd thesis
• tabling as a library with delimited control
• indexing of dif/2, as you mentioned
• reasoning about business grants
• dose escalation protocols in prolog
• coding guidlines for prolog

[ocharles]

It seems that not every school of thought adheres too this, but from what I can determine, there seems to be #2501 (comment) for not adhering to the "monotic core".

Yes, absolutely. I very much share your view here and am also only interested in that bit.

[triska]

• Teaching Beginners Prolog - How to Teach Prolog with accompanying slides.
• Declarative program development in Prolog with GUPU
• Declarative Language Extensions for Prolog Courses

All and more available from: https://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/ulrich/papers/PDF/

[jjtolton]

@triska I'm very interested in the theory and techniques behind clp(z), clp(fd), and clp(b). Even working on a small search problem made me realize this is going to become vert important very quickly, and I need to either learn to make the best use of the existing tools or learn to use the techniques to make these problems tractable. Any suggestions on resources for that? When I feel brave, sometimes I take a peek at the clp(z) source code, but I probably need to start on some smaller problems and work up to that 😅

[jjtolton]

Ok to answer my own question, @triska 's Correctness Considerations in CLP(FD) Systems is great by itself and also has a great bibliography! 😀

[haijinSk]

I'm very interested in the theory and techniques...

On edx.org there is a free MOOC, "LouvainX: Constraint Programming: Learn the basics of constraint programming from the implementation of solvers to modeling techniques for solving concrete combinatorial problems such as routing and scheduling."

"This course is being instructed by AI4OPT principal investigator Pascal Van Hentenryck..."

https://www.edx.org/learn/computer-programming/universite-catholique-de-louvain-constraint-programming

https://www.ai4opt.org/news-events/constraint-programming-course-edx

The course teaches the architecture of a constraint programming solver/relevant theory and how to implementing it from the scratch, so to speak, but the implementation language is Java.

Also, a paper: Tejas Santanam, Pascal Van Hentenryck: Modern Constraint Programming Education: Lessons for the Future, 2023

https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.13676

PS: There are more free MOOC courses on CP and optimization (but not in the context of Prolog).

[jjtolton]

Moving this discussion over here to keep things tidy!

[hurufu]

I would recommend Fifty Years of Prolog and Beyond

[hurufu]

I have recently read draft manuscript that describes Web Prolog in a great detail. It documents an Erlang style concurrency in ISO Prolog. Quite insightful. Sadly it isn't currently implementable in Scryer, because it needs multi-threading support.