The Transparent Prolog Machine

The Transparent Prolog Machine: Visualizing Logic Programs by Mark Eisenstadt, Mike Brayshaw, and Jocelyn Ireson-Paine, Intellect 1991. Copies can be ordered from Intellect.

This book describes a visual debugger for Prolog, based on the idea of displaying a program as an (augmented) AND-OR tree, and showing its execution as a sequence of visits to the nodes. Part 1 of the book is a reprint of Eisenstadt and Brayshaw's article from the Journal of Logic Programming 1988. Parts 2 and 3, written by me, are a tutorial and user guide for a version of TPM developed in collaboration between Expert Systems International in Oxford and the Open University. Part 2 could be useful in teaching Prolog even to users without TPM, since it shows the AND-OR trees corresponding to a wide variety of Prolog programs, and also describes an easy-to-understand two-stack model of Prolog execution.

The book started off as a manual for a commercial product. I don't think this version of TPM is still on sale, but I believe the Open University use another version in their Prolog courses.


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Jocelyn Ireson-Paine
14th August 1996