As a young man, when mainframes were still king, I became acquainted with Prolog. Now that I am old and have more time I would like to see if it still holds the same fascination, so I need a version to run on Windows XP. To make the question more general, if someone wants to do some programming on their PC, how do they decide which language compiler/interpreter to buy? Richard Brown
Programming languages are tools, so generally people choose the language that seems best suited to what they want to do. Prolog became famous in the 1980s when it was adopted by the Japanese for artificial intelligence (AI) programming, and fell back into obscurity when Japan's Fifth Generation project failed. However, the more-or-less standard on PCs today is SWI-Prolog (swi-prolog.org), which is free and open source. An alternative from Bulgaria is Strawberry Prolog (dobrev.com), which is aimed at education. You could probably use either with the online course, Learn Prolog Now! (tinyurl.com/239n2e). Still, if you want an AI-style language, I think you'd be better off learning Lisp.
There is also Visual Prolog (visual-prolog.com), from the Prolog Development Centre in Denmark. This has its roots in PDC-Prolog and the Turbo Prolog once sold by Borland alongside Turbo Pascal. This is non-standard, but has a built-in graphical environment and looks a good bet if you actually want to get something done. There's a free Personal Edition.
However, the daddy in the home and emerging programmer field is Microsoft Visual Basic 2008 Express Edition. This is a graphical system that bears little relation to old-style Basic. It uses a drag-and-drop program construction with Microsoft Office-style AutoCorrect and IntelliSense features that fix common programming errors. There's an introductory video, a beginner's learning centre, forums, a Coding4Fun (C4F) developer toolkit, and a Facebook Developer Kit.
If you're against Basic, there are Visual Express versions of C#, C++ and Visual Web Developer. They are all free, in exchange for registration, as part of the strategy for generating profitable sales of Microsoft Visual Studio.
I know there's a nostalgia market for people who loved the old BBC Basic (bbcbasic.co.uk), and there's now a BBC Basic for Windows. But visual-style programming with pre-built components makes it much easier to do more.
