On Fri, Sep 14, 2012 at 6:57 PM, John Mark Agosta <jmagosta(a)us.toyota-itc.com> wrote:
As a person teaching themselves prolog, after a few hours of reading manuals and searching the web, I still have some very rudimentary questions about how to use Ciao:
- Is there a way to do manual entry of predicates in the interpreter, as one
would do by using
?- [user].
in GNU-prolog?
Unfortunatelly there is no support for [user]. When using Ciao in an Emacs environment, it is recommended to write predicates and programs directly in files. You can consult whole files, parts of files (emacs regions), or individual predicates from Ciao menu bar.
How does one name these two modes, one for manual entry, and one for running the interpreter?
I am aware that I can invoke ciao in emacs via $ emacs -f ciao
-or-$ emacs my_prolog_program.pl
and that this works well.
- Are there command line arguments to ciao, ciao-sh, etc.? The man page offers
a wonderful advertisement for the tool, but no documentation of the executable, or related executables.
Yes, there is documentation about the command line tools, but not in man format at this moment. The main reason is that most of the effort has focused so far on the use case where Emacs is the main development environment (where Info is the preferred documentation format). You can find it in the "The stand-alone command-line compiler" section in the Ciao info manual. Alternatively, you can also find it on the HTML version of the manual:
http://ciaohome.org/docs/ciao/ciaoc.html
We are aware that we lack many features in Ciao when used directly from a terminal (no Emacs at all). We could implement them if there is enough interest, for example:
- support for readline - query predicate documentation from the toplevel - man pages for command-line tools (which is what most users expect).
- Can anyone point to a step by step tutorial on running a ciao session that
points out how it differs in usage from other prolog tools?
The basic introductory material is located at:
http://ciaohome.org/other_docs.html
You can also browser the manuals. Many libraries and most language extensions contain examples and detailed documentation. We have some plans for easier tutorials and more accessible manuals. Of course, any suggestion or contribution is really welcome.
Regards,