Papers › Coding Guidelines for Prolog
Coding Guidelines for Prolog
Michael A. Covington, Roberto Bagnara, Richard A. O'Keefe, Jan Wielemaker, Simon Price
The archive published only this paper's code-link row. Authors, date and abstract are from arXiv's metadata (CC0), read from the Kaggle arXiv metadata snapshot of 2026-09-12 where its title matched the archive's; the title is the archive's.
Coding standards and good practices are fundamental to a disciplined approach to software projects, whatever programming languages they employ. Prolog programming can benefit from such an approach, perhaps more than programming in other languages. Despite this, no widely accepted standards and practices seem to have emerged up to now. The present paper is a first step towards filling this void: it provides immediate guidelines for code layout, naming conventions, documentation, proper use of Prolog features, program development, debugging and testing. Presented with each guideline is its rationale and, where sensible options exist, illustrations of the relative pros and cons for each alternative. A coding standard should always be selected on a per-project basis, based on a host of issues pertinent to any given programming project; for this reason the paper goes beyond the mere provision of normative guidelines by discussing key factors and important criteria that should be taken into account when deciding on a fully-fledged coding standard for the project.
Code
Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.
Code Syntology ran Syntology
Not run by Syntology. Nothing on this page verifies that the listed code works.
Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28
No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.
Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections