Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by taneq 2730 days ago
Sounds more like true and null? Or does it not definitively disprove things?
2 comments

The parent is mistaken. A "false" answer definitely means that no (further) solution exists. You can ask for time or depth limits in practical Prologs, but in basic standard Prolog "false" doesn not mean "could not prove it in time".

Of course some things cannot be disproven, and in those cases (again, if you don't request otherwise) you will get nontermination.

Prolog uses the closed world assumption: if something cannot be proven, it is considered false.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed-world_assumption