One suspects that the people who use computers for their livelihood are growing more "sophisticated" as the field of computer science evolves. This view might be defended by the expanding use of languages such as C and Lisp in contrast to the languages such as FORTRAN and COBOL. This hypothesis is false however - computer languages are not like natural languages where successive generations stick with the language of their ancestors. Computer programmers do not grow more sophisticated - programmers simply take the time to muddle through the increasingly complex language semantics in an attempt to write useful programs. Of course, these programmers are "sophisticated" in the same sense as are hackers of MockLisp, PostScript, and Tex - highly specialized and tedious languages. It is quite frustrating how this myth of sophistication is propagated by some industries, universities, and government agencies. When I was an undergraduate at MIT, I distinctly remember the convoluted questions on exams concerning dynamic scoping in Lisp - the emphasis was placed solely on a "hacker's" view of computation, i. e. , the control and manipulation of storage cells. No consideration was given to the logical structure of programs. Within the past five years, Ada and Common Lisp have become programming language standards, despite their complexity (note that dynamic scoping was dropped even from Common Lisp). Of course, most industries' selection of programming languages are primarily driven by the requirement for compatibility (with previous software) and performance.

This monograph presents a novel execution model for the parallel execution of standard sequential Prolog. In this execution model Prolog procedure calls can be efficiently pipelined, and the author shows how even fully deterministic Prolog programs can be effectively mapped onto the proposed architecture. The design is based on a highly optimized abstract Prolog specific instruction set. A special feature of this work is a sophisticated classification scheme for Prolog variables which substantially reduces the overhead for unification with occur-check. To support the model an architecture consisting of a circular pipeline of independent processors has been designed. This pipeline has been designed to work as a co-processor to a UNIX based workstation. In contrast to other attempts to execute sequential Prolog in parallel, the proposed model does not restrict the use of any of the standard Prolog language features. The book gives a full account of the execution model, the system architecture, and the abstract Prolog instruction set.

This volume contains the papers which have been accepted for presentation atthe Third International Symposium on Programming Language Implementation andLogic Programming (PLILP '91) held in Passau, Germany, August 26-28, 1991. The aim of the symposium was to explore new declarative concepts, methods and techniques relevant for the implementation of all kinds of programming languages, whether algorithmic or declarative ones. The intention was to gather researchers from the fields of algorithmic programming languages as well as logic, functional and object-oriented programming. This volume contains the two invited talks given at the symposium by H. Ait-Kaci and D.B. MacQueen, 32 selected papers, and abstracts of several system demonstrations. The proceedings of PLILP '88 and PLILP '90 are available as Lecture Notes in Computer Science Volumes 348 and 456.

This volume contains 64 papers from contributors around the world on a wide range of topics in database systems research. Of special mention are the papers describing the practical experiences of developing and implementing some of the many useful database systems on the market. Readers should find useful new ideas from the proceedings of this international symposium.

This volume presents the proceedings of the 6th Portuguese Conference on Artificial Intelligence, EPIA '93, organized by the Portuguese Artificial Intelligence Association. Like the last two conferences in this series, it was run as an international event with strict requirements as to the quality of accepted submissions. Fifty-one submissions were receivedfrom 9 countries, the largest numbers coming from Portugal (18), Germany (10), and France (8). The volume contains 25 selected papers, together with 7 poster abstracts and one invited lecture: "Organizations as complex, dynamic design problems" by L. Gasser, I. Hulthage, B. Leverich, J. Lieb, and A. Majchrzak, all from the University of Southern California. The papersare grouped into parts on: distributed artificial intelligence, natural language processing, knowledge representation, logic programming, non-standard logics, automated reasoning, constraints, planning, and learning.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Logic Programming, ICLP 2001, held in Paphos, Cyprus in November/December 2001. The 23 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 64 submissions. All current aspects of logic programming and computational logics are addressed.