Using Prolog as metalanguage for teaching programming language concepts

Henning Christiansen
Department of Computer Science
Roskilde University, P.O.Box 260, DK-4000 Roskilde, Denmark


We describe our experiences with a methodology for teaching programming language concepts in which Prolog is applied as metalanguage. Prolog can be seen as an integration of a logical specification language and a collection of practical accessories expected for an interactive, general purpose programming environment. This, together with the easy-to-extend-and-modify characteristics of Prolog programs, makes Prolog ideal in a teaching context: Assuming the students have grasped the overall flavour of Prolog, specifications written in Prolog are immediately understandable to them and this understanding can be further supported by running small examples, either by themselves or by the lecturer using a projector and running computer session in the lecture room.
We do not pretend to have made new contributions to the theory of programming language descriptions. Our semantic descriptions are closely related to Plotkin's operational semantics~\cite{plotkin-81} (see also~\cite{winskel-93}). But in our setting, these specifications are actually running interpreters that serve as prototype implementations. In addition, they are easily extended into prototypes of programming tools such as tracers, debuggers, time-measurers, etc.\ so that these can be characterized in a systematic framework. The familiar relation between typing/type checking and unification is also used for describing concise type-checkers with similar qualities.
In a course on programming languages, Prolog can also serve as an interesting example of a ``different'' language compared with standard imperative or object-oriented languages. In the teaching of Prolog in this context, it is obvious to emphasize Prolog's inherent meta-circular facilities such as assert-retract and its approximation to negation-as-failure and, at the syntactic level, operator declarations. The obvious imperfections of some of these facilities are not a problem: They can be featured in the course as points of departures for critical discussions of language design and pragmatics. Putting emphasis on a mathematically-logical (or simpler, a set-theoretic) semantics for the core of Prolog helps students accept our in-Prolog specifications as ``formal'' descriptions. Finally, this sort of language definitions serves also the extra purpose as strong evidence for the qualities of declarative programming.
In the paper, we describe our experiences with the methodology giving samples of such language descriptions and explain how they are applied in our teaching.


In Kacprzyk J., M. Krawczak and S. Zadrozny (eds.) Issues in Information Technology, EXIT, Warszawa, 2002, pp. 59-82.

See pfd.