Prolog Coding Guidelines: Status and Tool Support
This addresses the problem of inconsistent coding practices for Prolog developers, but it is incremental as it focuses on tool support rather than new guidelines.
The paper evaluated the status of coding guidelines in the Prolog community and implemented a linter to automatically verify adherence, finding that current guidelines are inconsistently applied across packages.
The importance of coding guidelines is generally accepted throughout developers of every programming language. Naturally, Prolog makes no exception. However, establishing coding guidelines is fraught with obstacles: Finding common ground on kind and selection of rules is matter of debate; once found, adhering to or enforcing rules is complicated as well, not least because of Prolog's flexible syntax without keywords. In this paper, we evaluate the status of coding guidelines in the Prolog community and discuss to what extent they can be automatically verified. We implemented a linter for Prolog and applied it to several packages to get a hold on the current state of the community.