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:
1) Is there a way to do manual entry of predicates in the interpreter, as one would do by using
?- [user].
in GNU-prolog?
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.
2) 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.
3) 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?
Thanks in advance -john mark agosta
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,
On 21 September 2012 18:19, Jose F. Morales <jfran(a)clip.dia.fi.upm.es>wrote:
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).
Well, I can unequivocally say that the interest I had in Ciao as of a few days ago has utterly vanished as a result of hearing that Emacs is, for all practical purposes, required. The only editor I use is ABE. (*A*nything *B *ut *E*macs)
I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person who doesn't use Emacs out there.
On Fri, Sep 21, 2012 at 2:59 PM, Michael Richter <ttmrichter(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On 21 September 2012 18:19, Jose F. Morales <jfran(a)clip.dia.fi.upm.es> wrote:
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).
Well, I can unequivocally say that the interest I had in Ciao as of a few days ago has utterly vanished as a result of hearing that Emacs is, for all practical purposes, required. The only editor I use is ABE. (Anything But Emacs)
I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person who doesn't use Emacs out there.
Dear Michael,
I heartily appreciate your interest in Ciao and your really interesting criticism. I just want to add some comments to Manuel's answer. We hope that you understand that Ciao is a *large* free and open source project with unfortunately limited resources (we are not Google). We are of course interested in either:
- Including non-Emacs based IDE for the Emacs-Allergic in Ciao. We had some prototype based on Eclipse IDE but it was not ready for distribution.
- Adding Ciao support to other non-Emacs based IDEs for Prolog. For example:
http://prodevtools.sourceforge.net/
Adding at least basic functionality should be trivial.
If any user is interested in contributing to any of those tasks, we will do our best to help him/her.
Best Regards,
-
John Mark Agosta -
Jose F. Morales -
Michael Richter