DM22, Spring 2006 - Weekly Note 15

The exact curriculum (pdf) for the course is now available.

There will be a "spørgetime" meeting Friday, June 9, at 12:15 in IMADA's seminar room (opposite room U49A). We will do the entire exam of summer 2005 (pdf), and will discuss any questions on the curriculum and the exam you may have.

The graded projects are now available at the lecturers office.

Lecture May 23

Finishing of Prolog and logic. Prolog grammar rules.

Reading

Chapter 10 in Clocksin and Mellish and Section 3.2 (in particular the algorithm on page 40) in Ulf Nilsson, Jan Maluszynski: Logic, Programming and Prolog, 2nd edition, Wiley, 1995. Chapter 9 in Clocksin and Mellish.

Comments

In relation to the exam, only the algorithm on page 40 in Nilsson and Maluszynski is relevant. It is not deep, but for a full understanding, reading most of Section 3.2, as well as Section 1.5 (and the errata of the book, which corrects an error in Section 1.5) is an advantage (mostly to get the notation used). The rest of the handed out Sections 3.1-3 can be seen as a more elaborate version of (part of) the material in Chapter 10 in Clocksin and Mellish.

The way subgoals are substituted for each other in Prolog during goal satisfaction makes it very easy to generate parsers for context free grammars. Prolog has some syntactic sugar ("Definite Clause Grammars") which makes writing such parsers even more straight-forward. Both things are covered in Chapter 9 of Clocksin and Mellish, which is left for reading on your own (note: it is still part of exam curriculum). It is not deep, and the essentials are repeated in these slides (txt).