An Evaluation of Prolog as a Prototyping System

Summary

Some experience has been gathered with Prolog for specification and prototyping of critical parts of interactive information systems- It is felt that this language is the first viable prototype for a really broad-band formal specification tool allowing immediate testing of the specified system. The main reason for this conclusion is the total abstraction from control flow in Prolog which frees one from the traditional program paradigms (e.g. structured, functional or object-oriented) and design strategies (top down or bottom up). However, although already quite usable for most specification and prototyping problems there is still room for further development of the language and its implementation. Most notably, there is a need for better tracing and debugging features, a more adaptable consulting mechanism, and a virtual terminal model supporting the definition of form terminals needed in many business programming tasks.