Data Structures

Lists

Lists are a special kind of compound term. Lists are defined inductively:

the atom [] is a list, denoting the empty list.
if Ls is a list, then the term '.'(L, Ls) is also a list.

There is a special syntax for denoting lists conveniently in Prolog:

The list '.'(a, '.'(b, '.'(c, []))) can also be written as [a,b,c].
The term '.'(L, Ls) can also be written as [L|Ls].

These notations can be combined in any way. For example, the term [a,b|Ls] is a list iff Ls is a list.

Creating lists

A list consisting of literals unified with the variable List:

?- List = [1,2,3,4].
List = [1, 2, 3, 4].

Building a list by consing:

?- Tail = [2, 3, 4], List = [1|Tail].
Tail = [2, 3, 4],
List = [1, 2, 3, 4].

Building a list of unknown values using the built-in length/2:

?- length(List,5).
List = [_G496, _G499, _G502, _G505, _G508].

Since in Prolog everything is in essence a Term, lists behave heterogeneous:

?- List = [1, 2>1, this, term(X), 7.3, a-A].
List = [1, 2>1, this, term(X), 7.3, a-A].

This means a list can also contain other lists, also called inner lists:

List = [[1,2],[3,[4]]].

Pairs

By convention, the functor (-)/2 is often used to denote pairs of elements in Prolog. For example, the term -(A, B) denotes the pair of elements A and B. In Prolog, (-)/2 is defined as an infix operator. Therefore, the term can be written equivalently as A-B.

Many commonly available predicates also use this syntax to denote pairs. Examples of this are keysort/2 and pairs_keys_values/3.

Association lists

In all serious Prolog systems, association lists are available to allow faster than linear access to a collection of elements. These association lists are typically based on balanced trees like AVL trees. There is a public domain library called library(assoc) that ships with many Prolog systems and provides O(log(N)) operations for inserting, fetching and changing elements to a collection.

Terms

On a very high level, Prolog only has a single data type, called term. In Prolog, all data is represented by Prolog terms. Terms are defined inductively:

an atom is a term. Examples of atoms are: x, test and 'quotes and space'.
a variable is a term. Variables start with an uppercase letter or underscore _.
integers and floating point numbers are terms. Examples: 42 and 42.42.
a compound term is a term, defined inductively as follows: If T1, T2, …, T_n are terms, then F(T1,T2,…,T_n) is also a term, where F is called the functor of the compound term.

Terms with named fields using library(record)

The [record][1] library provides the ability to create compound terms with named fields. The directive :- record/1 <spec> compiles to a collection of predicates that initialize, set and get fields in the term defined by <spec>.

For example, we can define a point data structure with named fields x and y:

:- use_module(library(record)).

:- record point(x:integer=0,
                y:integer=0).

/* - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -

?- default_point(Point), point_x(Point, X), set_x_of_point(10, Point, Point1).
Point = point(0, 0),
X = 0,
Point1 = point(10, 0).

?- make_point([y(20)], Point). 
Point = point(0, 20).

?-  is_point(X). 
false.

?- is_point(point(_, _)).
false.

?- is_point(point(1, a)).
false.

?- is_point(point(1, 1)).
true.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - */