[upghost]

In Prolog the syntax is incredibly important. It is designed to be metainterpreted with the same ease in which a for-loop might be written in another language.

https://www.metalevel.at/acomip/

  mi1(true).
  mi1((A,B)) :-
        mi1(A),
        mi1(B).
  mi1(Goal) :-
        Goal \= true,
        Goal \= (_,_),
        clause(Goal, Body),
        mi1(Body).

This can be arbitrarily extended in very interesting, beautiful, and powerful ways. This is extraordinarily hard to achieve and did not happen by accident.

As a challenge, see how easy it is to write a metainterpreter in another language of your choice. Alternately, see if you can think of any way the metainterpretation system in Prolog could be improved.

Finally, think of what would happen to this if we changed the syntax and introduced something like object.field notation.

So while logical programming can be achieved with other syntaxes, the metaintrepretive aspect will be lost. I have yet to see a language that does this better.

[Twey]

Nice link, thank you! I'm not sure it's super related to my comment but it is closely related to some other things I'm thinking about. I'll give it a read :)