An intelligent control system for visual languages

This paper describes a visual dialect of Prolog, which generates bytecode for the Java Virtual Machine. Netprolog aims at giving the Prolog community the possibility of programming in logic for the Internet. The language is more declarative than ISO Prolog, because it has an automatic tool to insert control into a DFD diagram, generating a Prolog program. It is also a strongly typed language. However, the user doesn't need to declare types, because the compiler has a type inference mechanism, not very different from the one found in languages like Clean and SML. Since Prolog control is given by the order of the literals in the clauses' bodies, insertion of control is achieved by sorting the literals. This is done by an explanation based learning mechanism (partial evaluation) which works on data-flow inferred by a symbolic execution of the program.