1. Logic programming did not seize the attention of most programmers until the Japanese announced that they had chosen Prolog for their ambitious Fifth Generation Computer Systems project. While that project appeàrs now to be hampered by bureaucratic difficulties, the interest it aroused in Prolog lives on. Part of the attraction of Prolog stems from the fact that the beginner will very quickly be able to write toy programs, even spectacular ones. Difficulties in creating larger programs, however, seem to bring back Prolog to the level of other programming languages. Such difficulties arise from numerous defects of Prolog, some of which are purely logicai in nature. Among the latter at least two should be mentioned: (a) the peculiar meaning of negation; (b) the fact that reduction to clausal form is not part of the language. As to (a), strictly speaking Prolog has no negation. Its notion ot.negation- as-failure - by which -i <p is inferred from fatture to infer y - is a tricky one. For instance, suppose that the goal likes (John, X ) succeeds with X instantiated to mary. Then not (likes (John, X )) fails, so X becomes uninstantiated and hence has no value. However not (not (likes (John, X ))) succeeds with X instantiated to mary. This makes the meaning of negation almost incomprehensible. As to (b), for efficiency Prolog uses the programmer, as it were, as a preprocessor for reduction to clausal form: with the gain in efficiency that one can very well imagine. Of course reduction to clausal form can be implemented in Prolog and bùilt up within every Prolog program together with a suitable user interface, but this is very much like designing a new programming language.