[gorkempacaci]

The generated programs are only technically Prolog programs. They use CLPFD, which makes these constraint programs. Prolog programs are quite a bit more tricky with termination issues. I wouldn’t have nitpicked if it wasn’t in the title.

Also, the experiment method has some flaws. Problems are hand-picked out of a random subset of the full set. Why not run the full set?

[YeGoblynQueenne]

>> Why not run the full set?

Most likely cherry-picking. The approach is only going to work well in domains where Prolog is commonly used to write solutions to problems, like logical puzzles or constraint problems etc.

[gorkempacaci]

Yeah probably.

[bbor]

Yeah I’m a huge proponent of this general philosophy, but after being introduced to prolog itself for a third of a semester back in undergrad I decided to stay far, far away. The vision never quite came through as clearly as it did for the other wacky languages, namely the functional family (Lisp and Haskell in my case). I believe you on the fundamental termination issues, but just basic phrasing seemed unnecessarily convoluted…

Since you seem like an expert: is there a better technology for logical/constraint programming? I loved predicate calculus in school so it seems like there should be something out there for me, but so far no dice. This seems kinda related to the widely-discussed paradigm of “Linear Programming”, but I’ve also failed to find much of interest there behind all the talk of “Management Theory” and detailed mathematical efficiency comparisons.

I guess Curry (from above) might be the go-to these days?

[gorkempacaci]

Curious to know what part of syntax you found convoluted. If you remember any examples I’d appreciate it. Maybe you want a constraint programming environment instead. As example check out Conjure from St Andrews: https://conjure.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorials-notebook....

More generally there are the theorem provers like Coq, etc., but their use cases are even more specific.