The birth of Prolog
Alain Colmerauer, Philippe Roussel · ACM eBooks · 1996
The programming language, Prolog, was born of a project aimed not at producing a programm3ing language but at processing natural languages; in this case, French. The project gave rise to a preliminary version of Prolog at the end of 1971 and a more definitive version at the end of 1972. This article gives the history of this project and describes in detail the preliminary and then the final versions of Prolog. The authors also felt it appropriate to describe the Q-systems because it was a language that played a prominent part in Prolog's genesis.