Enhancing Prolog to support Prolog programming environments

Abstract

This paper describes the basic ideas we followed in the development of PROSE, a Prolog programming support environment we are implementing at our Department. We claim that standard Prolog must be adequately enhanced to be well suited to support the construction of an efficient programming environment. For this purpose, some new facilities are supplied by our Prolog (called Env_Prolog) which are mainly intended to allow the language: -to handle programs as data and to partition the program database into disjoint sets of clauses; -to support "editing" of clauses in the program database and the controlled execution of Prolog programs. Env_Protog has been implemented by developing a new interpreter written in the C language. The paper will concentrate mainly on the interpreter and the support it offers to other tools of the environment.

In Praise of Impredicativity: A Contribution to the Formalization of Meta-Programming

“…'LOG (Cervesato and Rossi 1992) has two naming relations associating "two different but related meta-representations with every syntactic object of the language, from characters to programs," "a constant name and a structured ground term, called the structural representation." This double naming relation generalizes those of Martelli and Rossi (1988) and Rossi (1989; that apply only to programs. 'LOG has an operator <=> that relates the name and the structural representation of each syntactic object.…”

Logic meta-programming facilities in 'LOG

“…A more concrete and complete version of this language, called Quote-Prolog, is under development at present. In particular, the notion of program name, program structure and the <=> operator dealing with them had already been implemented in EnvProlog [10,11,12] and has been now successfully re-implemented (in a better structured way, and including clause names) in a new extended Prolog interpreter written in Modula 2. It is planned for the near future to continue this implementation to include all the meta-level features of 'LOG.…”

“…Following EnvProlog [10], we call these meta-predicates ecall and eclause, respectively. In particular, the ecall predicate is defined as follows:…”

“…The idea of a double meta-representation was already applied in a more pragmatical sense and to a limited extent (programs only) to the definition of the meta-logical facilities of the EnvProlog language, an extended Prolog aimed at building Prolog programming environments [10,11,12]. In this paper, we start instead with a pure logic programming language and we apply the naming scheme to every syntactic entity of the language.…”