On Functors

You're replying to a comment by Keith Gaughan.

December 27, 2011, 19:25

I think you've misunderstood.

Peteris's post was about how four different languages have things they call 'functor' that are completely different. He then went on to explain them. None of the things called 'functor' in the post are related except in that they share the same name. 'Functor' is one of these things that, in computing has radically different meanings depending on context.

Back to Prolog though. Prolog has things called 'atom', essentially symbolic identifiers. Prolog allows you to specify the relationship between various atoms, thus the term 'foo(bar, baz)' states that atoms 'bar' and 'baz' have a relationship symbolised by the atom 'foo'. Prolog calls the atom in a term that symbolises the relationship between its arguments the 'functor', though something like 'predicate' would likely have been a less confusing choice.

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