Article · Wikipedia archive · Last revised Jul 4, 2026

Absys

Absys was an early declarative programming language from the University of Aberdeen. It anticipated a number of features of Prolog such as negation as failure, aggregation operators, the central role of backtracking and constraint solving. Absys was the first implementation of a logic programming language.

Last revised
Jul 4, 2026
Read time
≈ 1 min
Length
126 w
Citations
5
Source
Wikipedia ↗
Absys
ParadigmLogic programming
First appeared1967
Influenced
Prolog

Absys was an early declarative programming language from the University of Aberdeen.1 It anticipated a number of features of Prolog such as negation as failure, aggregation operators, the central role of backtracking2 and constraint solving.1 Absys was the first implementation of a logic programming language.1

The name Absys was chosen as an abbreviation for Aberdeen System.1

See also

See also

References

References

  1. Elcock, E.W. (1990). "Absys: the first logic programming language —A retrospective and a commentary". The Journal of Logic Programming. 9 (1): 1–17. doi:10.1016/0743-1066(90)90030-9.
  2. Kowalski, R. A. (1988). "The early years of logic programming" (PDF). Communications of the ACM. 31: 38. doi:10.1145/35043.35046. S2CID 12259230.
  • "ABSYS: An Incremental Compiler for Assertions", J.M. Foster et al., Mach Intell 4, Edinburgh U Press, 1969, pp. 423–429