Teaching, learning and using Prolog: supporting the programmer

Abstract

This special issue of Instructional Science is part B of two parts devoted to funda mental research that informs the teaching community about some of the issues and problems connected with teaching, learning and using Prolog. Both in part A (Pain et al., 1990) and here, the focus is on the improvement of our understanding in order to encourage the best use of Prolog. There is no concerted attack on Prolog, but a determination to improve the learning and appli cation of a language which has some considerable promise. The idea for this stemmed from a workshop held in 1987 at Cosener's House, Abingdon, and funded by the Alvey programme. Fifteen academic and industrial researchers met to discuss the current state of research relating to the use of Prolog by programmers with the main emphasis on issues relating to learning Prolog. Two of the papers in this special issue were the result of discussions that happened at the workshop which had an unusual structure in that people were encouraged to form groups with the express purpose of generating outline papers. In particular, three papers owe a great debt to the cooperation of the participants, initially at the workshop, and then afterwards: Towards a taxonomy of novices' misconceptions of the Prolog interpreter by Fung et al. (part A), Prolog program ming techniques by Bma et al. (part B), and An overview of Prolog debugging tools by Brna et al (part B). Workshop topics included: misconceptions held by novices; ways of repre senting the behaviour of Prolog; means of relating the structure of programs to the computation they perform; and methods of assisting students to debug their programs. The resulting papers can, therefore, for the most part be considered as characterising the work being done by the attendees both at that time and since. The main audience for this Special Issue is intended to be those who teach Prolog as an introductory course to undergraduates or postgraduates, and to teach ers of Prolog at the secondary and primary levels. We expect, and hope, that this issue will also be of interest to researchers who are interested in improving the teaching of computer languages and to those who are constructing computer based support for the use of Prolog.