"Sponsored by the Association for Computing Machinery, Special Interest Group on Programming Languages (SIGPLAN)."

Addressed to readers at different levels of programming expertise, The Practice ofProlog offers a departure from current books that focus on small programming examples requiringadditional instruction in order to extend them to full programming projects. It shows how to designand organize moderate to large Prolog programs, providing a collection of eight programmingprojects, each with a particular application, and illustrating how a Prolog program was written tosolve the application. These range from a simple learning program to designing a database formolecular biology to natural language generation from plans and stream data analysis.Leon Sterlingis Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Engineering and Science at Case Western ReserveUniversity. He is the coauthor, along with Ehud Shapiro, of The Art of Prolog.Contents: A SimpleLearning Program, Richard O'Keefe. Designing a Prolog Database for Molecular Biology, Ewing Lusk,Robert Olson, Ross Overbeek, Steve Tuecke. Parallelizing a Pascal Compiler, Eran Gabber. PREDITOR: AProlog-Based VLSI Editor, Peter B. Reintjes. Assisting Register Transfer Level Hardware Design, PaulDrongowski. Design and Implementation of aPartial Evaluation System, Arun Lakhotia, Leon Sterling.Natural Language Generation from Plans, Chris Mellish. Stream Data Analysis in Prolog, Stott Parker.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Second Asian Symposium on Programming Languages and Systems, APLAS 2004, held in Taipei, Taiwan in November 2004. The 26 revised full papers presented together with abstracts of 3 invited talks were carefully reviewed and selected from 97 submissions. Among the topics covered are type theory, program transformation, static analysis, verification, concurrent systems, code generation, programming calculi, functional programming languages, language support, component systems, real-time systems, embedded systems, formal systems design, object-oriented design, Java objects, program optimization .