We argue that the situation calculus is a natural formalism for representing and reasoning about control and strategic information. As a case study, in this paper we provide a situation calculus semantics for the Prolog cut operator, the central search control operator in Prolog. We show that our semantics is wellbehaved when the programs are properly strati ed, and that according to this semantics, the conventional implementation of the negation-as-failure operator using cut is provably correct with respect to the stable model semantics.