Tables as a User Interface for Logic Programs.
Mantis H. M. Cheng, M. H. van Emden, Jimmy H. M. Lee · 1988
Spreadsheets have introduced two advantages not typically available in user interfaces to logic programs: the exploratory use of a computer and a two-dimensional interface. In this paper we show that not only spreadsheets, but also tables (in the sense of relational databases) have these valuable features. We compare spreadsheets and tables, giving possibly the first clear distinction between the two and suggest a common generalization. We show that tables, as a user interface for logic programs, can be derived from a dataflow model of queries (which we call TuplePipes), which provides also the buffering needed when Prolog is interfaced with a relational database. We report on Tupilog, a prototype implementation of logic programming allowing four query modes, one of which is TuplePipes.