Communications of the ACM
Prolog - the language and its implementation compared with Lisp
Proceedings of the 1977 symposium on Artificial intelligence and programming languages
A comparison of Lisp, Prolog, and Ada programming productivity in AI area
ICSE '85 Proceedings of the 8th international conference on Software engineering
ACM SIGPLAN Notices
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This is a report on a very concrete experiment to compare the relative speeds of DEC-10 Prolog (Edinburgh implementation) and DEC-10 LISP (Texas implementation of UCI-LISP, or TLISP). The comparison was made on the occasion of programming a theorem prover for the propositional calculus, natural-deduction type. The prover is complicated enough so as to try sufficiently sophisticated weaponry of each language, yet simple enough for the human eye to follow both programs in parallel and make sure that they are accomplishing very much the same thing. The experiment was not undertaken with the direct intention of determining the relative performances of the two languages in general, but with the more specific goal of providing a basis for choosing a language for a large research project. Nevertheless, the results are interesting enough so as to make us consider them worth divulging, especially because they seem to contradict the notion, repeatedly argued for by Prolog advocates, that performances of the two languages are similar in relation to speed.