Some online books show how to implement simple "Prolog" engines in Lisp. These engines typically assume a representation of Prolog programs that is convenient from a Lisp perspective, and can't even parse a single proper Prolog term. Instead, they require you to manually translate Prolog programs to Lisp forms that are no longer valid Prolog syntax. With this approach, implementing a simple "Lisp" in Prolog is even easier ("Lisp in Prolog in zero lines"): Manually translate each Lisp function to a Prolog predicate with one additional argument to hold the original function's return value. Done. This is possible since a function is a special case of a relation, and functional programming is a restricted form of logic programming.
Here is a bit beyond that: lisprolog.pl
These 165 lines of Prolog code give you an interpreter for a simple Lisp, including a parser to let you write Lisp code in its natural form.
Internally, Prolog Definite Clause Grammars are used for parsing Lisp code, and semicontext notation is used to implicitly thread through certain arguments. This Prolog feature is very similar to Haskell's monads.
Read The Power of Prolog for more information about Prolog.
Sample queries, using Scryer Prolog:
Append:
?- run(" \
\
(defun append (x y) \
(if x \
(cons (car x) (append (cdr x) y)) \
y)) \
\
(append '(a b) '(3 4 5)) \
\
", Vs).
Vs = [append,[a,b,3,4,5]].
Fibonacci, naive version:
?- time(run(" \
\
(defun fib (n) \
(if (= 0 n) \
0 \
(if (= 1 n) \
1 \
(+ (fib (- n 1)) (fib (- n 2)))))) \
(fib 24) \
\
", Vs)).
% CPU time: 6.414s
Vs = [fib,46368].
Fibonacci, accumulating version:
?- time(run(" \
\
(defun fib (n) \
(if (= 0 n) 0 (fib1 0 1 1 n))) \
\
(defun fib1 (f1 f2 i to) \
(if (= i to) \
f2 \
(fib1 f2 (+ f1 f2) (+ i 1) to))) \
\
(fib 250) \
\
", Vs)).
% CPU time: 0.020s
Vs = [fib,fib1,7896325826131730509282738943634332893686268675876375].
Fibonacci, iterative version:
?- time(run(" \
\
(defun fib (n) \
(setq f (cons 0 1)) \
(setq i 0) \
(while (< i n) \
(setq f (cons (cdr f) (+ (car f) (cdr f)))) \
(setq i (+ i 1))) \
(car f)) \
\
(fib 350) \
\
", Vs)).
% CPU time: 0.021s
Vs = [fib,6254449428820551641549772190170184190608177514674331726439961915653414425].
Higher-order programming and eval:
?- run(" \
\
(defun map (f xs) \
(if xs \
(cons (eval (list f (car xs))) (map f (cdr xs))) \
())) \
\
(defun plus1 (x) (+ 1 x)) \
\
(map 'plus1 '(1 2 3)) \
\
", Vs).
Vs = [map,plus1,[2,3,4]].
More information about this interpreter is available at: