List of programming languages for artificial intelligence

Artificial intelligence researchers have developed several specialized programming languages for artificial intelligence:

Languages

• IPL^[1] was the first language developed for artificial intelligence. It includes features intended to support programs that could perform general problem solving, including lists, associations, schemas (frames), dynamic memory allocation, data types, recursion, associative retrieval, functions as arguments, generators (streams), and cooperative multitasking.
• Lisp^[2] is a practical mathematical notation for computer programs based on lambda calculus. Linked lists are one of Lisp languages' major data structures, and Lisp source code is itself made up of lists. As a result, Lisp programs can manipulate source code as a data structure, giving rise to the macro systems that allow programmers to create new syntax or even new domain-specific programming languages embedded in Lisp. There are many dialects of Lisp in use today, among them are Common Lisp, Scheme, and Clojure.
• Prolog^[3][4] is a declarative language where programs are expressed in terms of relations, and execution occurs by running queries over these relations. Prolog is particularly useful for symbolic reasoning, database and language parsing applications. Prolog is widely used in AI today.
• STRIPS is a language for expressing automated planning problem instances. It expresses an initial state, the goal states, and a set of actions. For each action preconditions (what must be established before the action is performed) and postconditions (what is established after the action is performed) are specified.
• Planner is a hybrid between procedural and logical languages. It gives a procedural interpretation to logical sentences where implications are interpreted with pattern-directed inference.
• POP-11 is a reflective, incrementally compiled programming language with many of the features of an interpreted language. It is the core language of the Poplog programming environment developed originally by the University of Sussex, and recently in the School of Computer Science at the University of Birmingham which hosts the Poplog website, It is often used to introduce symbolic programming techniques to programmers of more conventional languages like Pascal, who find POP syntax more familiar than that of Lisp. One of POP-11's features is that it supports first-class functions.

AI applications are also often written in standard languages like C++ and languages designed for mathematics, such as MATLAB and Lush.

• Haskell is also a very good programming language for AI. Lazy evaluation and the list and LogicT monads make it easy to express non-deterministic algorithms, which is often the case. Infinite data structures are great for search trees. The language's features enable a compositional way of expressing the algorithms. The only drawback is that working with graphs is a bit harder at first because of purity.

Notes

References