Book Review: Symbolic Computing with Lisp and Prolog by Robert A Mueller and Rex L. Page (John Wiley and Sons)

This book covers the major portions of symbolic computing and denotational (declarative) programming. The main thrust of the authors is to contrast and compare the two major tools for symbolic computing, viz. Lisp and Prolog. For this purpose, the book has been sub-divided into the following four major sections:Section I: Lisp;Section II: Prolog;Section III: Lisp vs Prolog; andSection IV: Applications.Each of these sections is further sub-divided into several chapters covering different aspects of the topic. Every chapter contains a variety of examples, solved respectively in Lisp or Prolog in the first two sections and in both the languages in the last two sections. Also, each of the chapters is followed by a chapter summary, bibliography notes, and a set of exercises. The spectrum of topics covered for each language includes, notation for data and variables, relations containing facts, list manipulation, recursion, unification, debugging, input/output, backtracking, higher-order functions, and manipulation of numbers.