Inform natural-language-based programming language

3rd January 2021 at 6:04am
interactive fiction

Nelson - Natural Language, Semantic Analysis and Interactive Fiction.pdf by Graham Nelson

Interesting paper that shows how "natural" English can be extremely powerful for programming:

if a woman (called the inhabitant) is in a room (called the place), say “[The inhabitant] is in [the place].”

What also impressed me was that English syntax are "easily" translated into a rule based language like Prolog or Datalog:

“somebody is in an adjacent room”
i.e., Exists x : person(x) and Exists y : room(y) and adjacent(y) and in(x, y)
i.e., Exists x : person(x) and room(parent(x)) and adjacent(parent(x))

Inform dates back to 1992. It makes me wonder if the current logic programming tools (Clojure core.logic) are any better and if so, what will I be able to do?

Related to


Backlinks: Inform and Versu PDFs, Linda tuple space