A study on assisting in Prolog program comprehension by using stepwise execution and stepwise comparison

Reading a program, learners must understand syntax, semantics, and usage, which are characteristics of each individual programming language. Moreover, they must acquire typical writing art through understanding various good programs. In order to obtain good programming methods, learners must also know the execution flow of programs, which is difficult to explain statically. In this paper, as a learning environment for Prolog programs, an animation tree is proposed, which allows learners to interactively manipulate program execution back and forth in a stepwise manner. The effect of the animation tree in the problem solving process and the contents of finding through comparison of two programs with the same structure are investigated.