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In erlang's pattern matching syntax, arguments given at run time are matched successively against number and types of formal parameters in each ";" separated clause in a function definition (plus against any guard's specified values).

This is similar to the syntax in haskell, F# and ocaml, so it may look weird at the outset but it's not an isolated weirdness, and it quickly becomes a natural way to read code.

Plenty of languages were initially prototyped in C, but we don't consider them "based on C" because they kept braces. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3542891/erlang-programmin...

The language has very definitely moved on and lost ALL of the defining features of Prolog except for some syntax elements. It only resembles Prolog in a very superficial way, mainly that variables start with a capital letter. The semantics are completely different.