PROLOG has (almost) the same Expressive Power as Human Language

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Many thanks to readers who appreciated this article (more than a thousand, so far). However, please note as…

• URGENT: My e-mail address is now omadeon AT hotmail.com; please DO NOT send any e-mail to my obsolete yahoo-account.

A few days ago, I wrote a short posting in this blog about the fact that The ultimate high productivity programming language is PROLOG. A few days later, I was quite astonished to see that this posting became extremely popular! It was listed as no. 35 in the “most popular postings worldwide” list of WordPress a few days ago. (You can click here to verify this claim, scrolling down to no. 35). Meanwhile, some people discussed the Prolog posting elsewhere on the Web. E.g. a discussion in the wiki-site “reddicious”, as well as in another blog (”The Hungry Brain” - here).

As a result, I will continue to write about Prolog, about why I use it, about the wonderful things you can do in it, and (last but not least) about the fallacy that it cannot be used as a “general purpose programming language“. Well, of course it can be used as a “general purpose language”! This is the philosophy of Visual Prolog -for example- created by an innovative bunch of nice people in Denmark (whom I met personally in a Prolog conference, in April 2006). They created this Prolog dialect and designed it for maximum speed, highest efficiency and ease of use, with a Visual development environment and an object-oriented structure (in the latest versions, 6 and 7). (more about this later, in another posting)

However, today I want to talk about one aspect of Prolog (and many similar Logic Programming languages, e.g. Mercury) that is rarely discussed and very rarely appreciated: The fact that…

So, what does this mean?

• Well, this idea is a verifiable fact in linguistics and NLP (Natural Language Programming).
  

• It’s also an issue of practical importance, since you can convert almost any human se