I was studying the PROLOG programming language, testing some examples and reading documentations. I started then to do heavy research about lists in PROLOG. The idea is: Head and Tail. I then learned that lists can be expressed in PROLOG like this:
[Head | Tail]
.
The syntax is pretty simple, square brackets with a head and a tail, separated by a vertical slash. I then asked myself what is the meaning (the semantics) of the vertical slash in PROLOG. As I said, I had done research concerning lists and the vertical slash as well, but I was not able to find something helpful about the it.
So this is why I am a little bit confused. I suppose it is indeed a special character, but why does it necessarily have to be a vertical slash? Is it an operator? Is it used for system or language (meta) applications? What is its specific function in the language?