A hardware-intended implementation of Prolog featuring a general solution to the clause indexing problem
Robert M. Colomb · UNSWorks (University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia) · 2022
The research published in this Dissertation consists of an implementation of Prolog with a number of novel features making it more useful for programming the solution of large problems.Its key idea is the use of superimposed coding as a clause indexing scheme, which makes it practical to work with knowledge bases consisting of thousands of clauses residing on disk.A major focus is on impact on the interpreter of hardware implementation, especially of the superimposed code calculations.Several language extensions made possible by bit-mapped indexing are implemented.Implementations of two others are proposed: a null value based on Skolem constants and a forward chaining system.Implementation in Hardware is the subject of Chapter six.The most important for this research is the Attached Index Machine which performs superimposed code word calculations.The actual hardware designs reported are the work of others in related projects.They are described sufficiently to show the effects of hardware implementation Chapter