Higher-order Programming
By definition, first-order logic does not allow quantification over predicates. A higher-order predicate is a predicate that takes one or more other predicates as arguments. Prolog already has some built-in higher-order predicates such as call/1, call/2, call/3, findall/3, setof/3, and bagof/3. Furthermore, since arbitrary Prolog goals can be constructed and evaluated at run-time, it is easy to write higher-order predicates like maplist/2, which applies an arbitrary predicate to each member of a given list, and sublist/3, which filters elements that satisfy a given predicate, also allowing for currying.
To convert solutions from temporal representation (answer substitutions on backtracking) to spatial representation (terms), Prolog has various all-solutions predicates that collect all answer substitutions of a given query in a list. This can be used for list comprehension. For example, perfect numbers equal the sum of their proper divisors:
perfect(N) :- between(1, inf, N), U is N // 2, findall(D, (between(1,U,D), N mod D =:= 0), Ds), sumlist(Ds, N).This can be used to enumerate perfect numbers, and also to check whether a number is perfect.
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