A tribute to Alain Colmerauer

Authors:
Jacques Cohen
Affiliations:
TJX/Feldberg Professor, Volen Center, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA 02454, USA (e-mail: jc@cs.brandeis.edu)
Venue:
Theory and Practice of Logic Programming
Year:
2001

Citing 12
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A view of the origins and development of Prolog

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The early years of logic programming

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Syntactic Analysis and Operator Precedence

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A Machine-Oriented Logic Based on the Resolution Principle

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Nondeterministic Algorithms

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Total Precedence Relations

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On the relative efficiencies of context-free grammar

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From Prolog III to Prolog IV: The Logic of Constraint ProgrammingRevisited

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Optimal Narrowing of a Block of Sortings in Optimal Time

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Expressiveness of Full First Order Constraints in the Algebra of Finite or Infinite Trees

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The birth of Prolog

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Algol-60 Implementation

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Abstract

As an invited contributor to this Festschrift honoring Alain Colmerauer, I feel compelled to give not only an account of his main research contributions, but also of my perspective on the motivations behind them. I hope that this will provide the reader with a glimpse of how a focused, tenacious, rigorous, and inventive mind like Alain's picks research problems and proceeds to solve them. The history of Prolog, the language that remains one of Alain's major accomplishments, is well documented. His paper on the ‘Birth of Prolog,’ co-authored with Philippe Roussel (Colmerauer & Roussel, 1970), is a highly recommended account of the circumstances that led to the development of Prolog. Bob Kowalski (1988) presents his views of the early history of Prolog from the automatic theorem proving perspective. Finally, my own paper on the topic (Cohen, 1988) contains material complementing Alain's and Bob's narratives. Instead of recasting already-available historical material, I have opted to present here a more personal account of Alain's contributions, acknowledging in advance the individual bias inherent in such an accounting of long-past events.