If Prolog is the Answer, What is the Question? or What it Takes to Support AI Programming Paradigms

Knowledge programming, which makes use of the explicit representation and interpretation of knowledge to create intelligent programs, requires specialized languages and tools to help programmers. Prolog, an implementation of a logic programing language, provides some of these tools; it and other languages have been argued to be the "best" way to do such knowledge programming. This paper raises questions which suggest that any single paradigm of programming (e.g., logic programming or object-oriented programming) benefits by being integrated in a single environment with other paradigms of programming. Integration of these paradigms with each other, and within a flexible, user-friendly computing environment is also necessary. Such an environment must provide source level debugging and monitoring facilities, analysis and performance tuning tools, and an extended set of user communication programs.