February 24, 2026
When logic meets Sound Blaster
Extending C with Prolog (1994)
90s code mashup revives IRQ trauma, Prolog fanfights, and LLM jokes
TLDR: A vintage guide on mixing C with Prolog resurfaced, complete with a 90s fix for clashing PC parts. Comments swung from IRQ nostalgia and practical Prolog wins to snark about “too much Prolog” and jabs that chatbots can’t reason, spotlighting old-school logic’s stubborn relevance
A 1994 Dr. Dobb’s blast-from-the-past about mixing C and Prolog just dropped, and the comments went full retro-chaos. The piece shows how Prolog’s rule-based logic pairs with C’s muscle, even demoing a tiny expert system to untangle 90s PC interrupt clashes (yes, Sound Blaster vs. Mitsumi CD‑ROM). Nostalgia hit hard: vintagedave relived Gateway multimedia installs and sighed that a “simple expert system could have helped” when IRQs collided. But not everyone wanted the Prolog party—krzyk snarked that flooding the feed with logic posts is how you “force redditors to stay away.”
Meanwhile, the tinkerers were dreaming. HexDecOctBin wondered what a Prolog baked into C would look like—basically turning rules into a native language add‑on. sprior dropped a war story: decades of home automation with SWI‑Prolog, CORBA message glue, and the pain of writing wrappers and juggling threads between C++ and Prolog—before ditching that setup. Then came the zinger: mcswell tossed shade at modern AI, quipping that large language models don’t “really do chained reasoning,” hinting this 30‑year‑old approach still slaps.
The vibe? A spicy split between logic‑programming loyalists and eye‑rollers. But the comment section turned a dusty tutorial into a popcorn show of IRQ PTSD, engineering scars, and fresh “what if” experiments—pure internet cinema
Key Points
- •The article explains how Prolog’s declarative strengths complement C/C++ and outlines interfacing via the Amzi! Prolog API.
- •It adheres to the Edinburgh Prolog standard, ensuring portability across conforming Prolog implementations.
- •Industrial examples include KnowledgeWare’s ADW, ICARUS tools, and Pacific AI solutions, all using Prolog for internal logic.
- •Prolog’s suitability for AI tasks is linked to its capabilities in symbol handling, unification, and backtracking.
- •A code comparison shows Prolog’s dynamic symbols and predicates can simplify command processing versus C’s string-based logic.