Ideas for the future of Prolog inspired by Oz

TL;DR

This paper explores how Oz's extensions to logic programming, including deterministic, lazy concurrent, and distributed paradigms, can inspire the future development of Prolog over the next 50 years.

Contribution

It proposes leveraging Oz's extensions to guide Prolog's evolution, highlighting three key paradigms for future enhancements.

Findings

Oz's subset closely relates to Prolog, enabling direct translation.

Extensions like deterministic logic, lazy concurrency, and distributed computing can benefit Prolog.

Proposes a roadmap for Prolog's evolution inspired by Oz.

Abstract

Both Prolog and Oz are multiparadigm languages with a logic programming core. There is a significant subset of Oz that is a syntactic variant of Prolog: pure Prolog programs with green or blue cuts and bagof/3 or setof/3 can be translated directly to Oz. Because of this close relationship between Prolog and Oz, we propose that the extensions made by Oz to logic programming can be an inspiration for the future evolution of Prolog. We explain three extensions, namely deterministic logic programming, lazy concurrent functional programming, and purely functional distributed computing. We briefly present these extensions and we explain how they can help Prolog evolve in its next 50 years.