I was wondering if there were any special tricks to using ciao from the interpreter. I'd like to avoid Emacs if at all possible, but I'm
Why? Lots of people have used it for a long time without any apparent serious damage... ;-)
The emacs interface is nice because it provides lots of useful facilities, including source debugging, syntax coloring, on-line help, error location, etc., etc. It makes a huge difference to productivity when compared to a command line.
Btw, if you (or anyone on the list) would like to use Eclipse, we also have a plugin available that we can send you (it is in Beta, but it works pretty well).
In any case, you can definitely use the traditional top level directly from a shell in the usual way:
[2]> ciao Ciao 1.13.0-6868 (svn) : Wed Sep 20 18:37:20 MDT 2006 ?- write(hello). hello yes ?-
not having luck doing the simplest commands at the prompt, and the answer wasn't in the smaller of the docs.
We would need to know more concretely what is the problem you are having. We will send you a separate message to get this part of the discussion off the list. If there anything of general interest comes up we will forward the messages to the list.