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Prolog Data Types: Atoms and Numbers

Prolog has one main data type called a term, which can be an atom, number, variable, or compound term. Atoms are names without meaning, numbers are integers or reals, and variables act as placeholders. Compound terms are structures made of a functor and arguments, like lists and structures. Terms unify if their corresponding parts are equal, like atoms unifying if they are the same atom, numbers if equal, variables if bound to the same term, and compound terms if their functors and arguments unify.

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92 views

Prolog Data Types: Atoms and Numbers

Prolog has one main data type called a term, which can be an atom, number, variable, or compound term. Atoms are names without meaning, numbers are integers or reals, and variables act as placeholders. Compound terms are structures made of a functor and arguments, like lists and structures. Terms unify if their corresponding parts are equal, like atoms unifying if they are the same atom, numbers if equal, variables if bound to the same term, and compound terms if their functors and arguments unify.

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borza_diana8714
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Prolog Data Types

Prolog's single data type is the term. Terms are either: atoms, numbers, variables
or compound terms (structures). The figure below presents a classification
of the data types in Prolog:

Fig. 1. – Prolog data types1

Atoms and numbers

An atom is a general-purpose name with no inherent meaning. It is


composed of a sequence of characters that is parsed by the Prolog reader as a
single unit. Atoms are usually bare words in Prolog code, written with no special
syntax. However, atoms containing spaces or certain other special characters
must be surrounded by single quotes. Atoms beginning with a capital letter must
also be quoted, to distinguish them from variables. The empty list, written [], is
also an atom. Other examples of atoms include:
x, blue, 'Taco', and 'some atom'.

Numbers can be integers or real numbers (not used very much in typical
Prolog programming).

Variables

Variables are denoted by a string consisting of letters, numbers and


underscore characters, and beginning with an upper-case letter or underscore.
Variables closely resemble variables in logic in that they are placeholders for
arbitrary terms. A variable can become instantiated (bound to equal a specific
term) via unification. A single underscore (_) denotes an anonymous variable and
means "any term". Unlike other variables, the underscore does not represent the
same value everywhere it occurs within a predicate definition.

Compound Terms

1 Figure taken from Ivan Bratko – Prolog Programming for Artificial Intelligence
A compound term is composed of an atom called a "functor" and a number
of "arguments", which are again terms. Compound terms are ordinarily written as
a functor followed by a comma-separated list of argument terms, which is
contained in parentheses. The number of arguments is called the term's arity. An
atom can be regarded as a compound term with arity zero.
Examples of compound terms are: truck_year('Mazda', 1986) and
'Person_Friends'(zelda,[tom,jim]). Users can declare arbitrary functors as operators
with different precedence to allow for domain-specific notations. The notation f/n
is commonly used to denote a term with functor f and arity n.

Special cases of compound terms:


• Lists are defined inductively. The list [1, 2, 3] would be represented
internally as '.'(1, '.'(2, '.'(3, []))). A syntactic shortcut is [H | T], which is
mostly used to construct rules. A list can be processed by processing the
first element, and then the rest of the list, in a recursive manner.
Lists can be constructed and deconstructed in a variety of ways:
o Element enumeration: [abc, 1, f(x), Y, g(A,rst)]
o Prepending single element: [abc | L1]
o Prepending multiple elements: [abc, 1, f(x) | L2]
o Term expansion: '.'(abc, '.'(1, '.'(f(x), '.'(Y, '.'(g(A,rst), [])))))

• Strings

Prolog Unification
• Atoms unify if and only if they are the same atom.
• Numbers unify if and only if they are the same number.
• Strings unify if and only if they are the same string.
• Lists unify if and only if
1. their heads unify, and
2. their tails unify.
• Structures unify if and only if
1. their names unify,
2. they have the same number of arguments, and
3. their arguments unify.
• Variable V unifies with Term T just in case one of the following conditions is
satisfied:
1. V is an instantiated variable.
 If T is not a variable, then V and T unify if and only if the term instantiated
on V unifies with T.
 If T is an instantiated variable, then V and T unify if and only if the term
instantiated on V unifies with the term instantiated on T.
 If T is an uninstantiated variable, then V and T are unified by instantiating
on T the term that is instantiated on V.
2. V is an uninstantiated variable.
 If T is not a variable, then V and T are unified by instantiating T on V.
 If T is an instantiated variable, then V and T are unified by instantiating on
V the term that is instantiated on T.
 If T is an uninstantiated variable, then V and T unify and become
synonyms for the same variable.

See Sicstus Prolog manual:

4.1.2 Terms
4.1.3 Compound Terms
4.8.1.2 Unification

EXERCISES

Execute the following unification queries. Explain the results in a text file:.

a. ?- a = a.
b. ?- a = b.
c. ?- 1 = 2.
d. ?- ‘ana’ = ‘Ana’.
e. ?- X = 1, Y = X.
f. ?- X = 3, Y = 2, X = Y.
g. ?- X = 3, X = Y, Y = 2.
h. ?- X = ana.
i. ?- X = ana, Y = ‘ana’, X = Y.
j. ?- a(b,c) = a(X,Y).
k. ?- a(X,c(d,X)) = a(2,c(d,Y)).
l. ?- a(X,Y) = a(b(c,Y),Z).
m. ?- tree(left, root, Right) = tree(left, root, tree(a, b, tree(c, d, e))).
n. ?- k(s(g),t(k)) = k(X,t(Y)).
o. ?- father(X) = X.
p. ?- loves(X,X) = loves(marsellus,mia).

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