SWI-Prolog

What is SWI-Prolog?

SWI-Prolog is a Prolog compiler, targeting primarily at research and education. Its strongest points are

• Very fast compilation.
• Robust.
• Small. Installed development compiler requires about 2 MB of your hard disk. For embedding, the SWI-Prolog kernel is about 350 KBytes. Can be in a shared object (DLL).
• Scales well for large applications. Hash-tables are automatically rehashed.
• Comprehensive set of built-in predicates, covering Edinburgh Prolog, and large parts of The ISO standard, Quintus and SICStus Prolog.
• Flexible and fast interface to the C- and C++-Language. The interface allows for calling both-ways, handling of non-determinism both ways and embedding of the SWI-Prolog kernel in C/C++ projects.
• The goodies: modules (upward compatible to Quintus and SICStus), garbage-collection (transparent to C/C++-code), last-call optimisation, Dynamic expansion of the runtime stacks, ISO exception-handling (including C/C++ interface for catching and throwing exceptions).
• Execution profiling (time and call statistics). Unix only.
• Portable to many platforms, including almost all Unix platforms, Win32 (Windows-95, 98 and NT) and some more obscure ports. Both 32-bits and 64-bits machines are supported.
• Machine-independent saved-states (save on one platform, run using the virtual machine of another platform).
• Distributed in source and binary on some platforms. You can easily recompile it for a different environment. Sources are plain ANSI-C, configured automatically using GNU autoconf.

Documentation

The reference manual for SWI-Prolog is also available on-line. The relevant commands are:

?- help.

Explain the help-system briefly.

?- help(Topic).

Show help-page on topic.

?- apropos(String).

Show all topics holding `String' in their summary documentation.

On Unix installations, the manpages pl.1, plld.1 and plrc.1 provide documentation on the command-line options of these commands.

Related resources

• Organizations
  • The Association of Logic Programming
• General Prolog resources on the WEB
  • The World Wide Web Virtual Library: Logic Programming
  • The Database of 1000 Prolog applications
  • `Official' Prolog faq as posted to comp.lang.prolog
• Resources mentioned as SWI-Prolog compliant
  • JPL: A Java Interface to Prolog by Fred Dushin
  • Logtalk: Prolog object package by Paulo Moura
  • Attribute-Logic Engine
  • Some notes for getting started using Prolog, by Jesse Monroy, Jr.