14Programming with Logic
Having seen a bit of how inference in first-order predicate logic works using truth trees, you might wonder just how much you can do with inference. The answer is, a whole heck of a lot! In fact, anything that a computer can do—any computation that can be written as a program—can be done by inference in first-order predicate logic!
This isn’t just an empty boast or a theoretical equivalence, but a real and practical fact. There’s a very powerful, very useful programming language called Prolog, in which a program consists of nothing but collections of facts and predicates—all you can do is provide it with a collection of facts and predicates. The execution of a Prolog program is a sequence of inferences performed by ...
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