The History of Logic Programming

Although the history of logic programming spans little more than 35 years, the history of logic goes back as far as 400BC, with Aristotle writing the Organon; a collection of six of his works on logic. Whilst logic has seen great change since then, with the introduction of predicate and modal disciplines, it still remains key to many aspects of computer science. As far as logic programming is concerned, First Order Logic is sufficient for all languages since it can be proven to be powerful enough to represent all computational problems.

In 1954, the first major programming language, Fortran, was produced. Fortran was developed to provide a high-level language that was as efficient as current assembly language. The language was particularly suited to scientific and engineering applications, but being a procedural, imperative programming language meant that it still had it's limitations in some circumstances.

It wasn't long, however, until the potential to combine programming with logic was observed in the field of automated theorem proving. In 1958, John McCarthy proposed that mathematical logic could be used to develop a system whereby new mathematical theorems could be discovered, and new proofs for existing theorems also found. However, there was still a major problem in the way of developing an autonomous theorem proving system. This problem concerns the large search spaces of possible proofs that an interpreter must be able to use in order to perform logical reasoning. At the time logic programming was first proposed, there were many inference rules required to reduce sentences. These rules had to be repeatedly applied in order to determine a logical consequence.