fact

artificial intelligence, programming The kind of clause

used in logic programming which has no subgoals and so is

always true (always succeeds). E.g.

wet(water).

male(denis).

This is in contrast to a rule which only succeeds if all its

subgoals do. Rules usually contain logic variables, facts

rarely do, except for oddities like "equal(X,X).".

(1996-10-20)