If you have never programmed in Prolog before, you should read all of this manual. Chapters 1-11 cover Prolog fundamentals, and you should read them before attempting any serious application development. The later chapters become very important as soon as you want to do serious programming. If you program in a procedural programming language such as C, Pascal, or Basic, pay close attention to the procedural discussions. At the end of Chapter 4, you will find a procedural overview of the material covered in the first three tutorial chapters. We also provide procedural discussions of recursion in Chapter 6.
If you have programmed in other Prologs and have a good understanding of Prolog fundamentals, you won't need much review. However, Visual Prolog has several extensions and is different from interpreted Prologs. We recommend that you read the release notes and Chapters 1 as an introduction. Chapter 3 explains the structure of a Visual Prolog program and Chapter 5 introduces the declarations. We also recommend that you read Chapter 8 on Visual Prolog's facts section, and Chapter 14, on the external database.
Chapters 12 through 16 provide valuable information that you will need if you plan to do serious programming.
If you think you could use a review of Visual Prolog programming, we recommend that you read from Chapter 16 on.
This user's guide is divided into four parts: a short introduction to the Visual Prolog environment; then the first ten tutorial chapters--which teach you how to program in Visual Prolog; then six chapters--which gives an overview of the predefined features of Visual Prolog - the standard predicates, the last part gives a complete systematic overview of the language, modular programming and interfacing to other languages.
Here's a summary of each chapter in this book:
Chapter 1: Getting Started describes how to run Visual Prolog on your system, provides a quick guide to the menus and the editor, and takes you through the steps involved in creating, running, and saving your first Visual Prolog program.
Chapter 2: Fundamentals of Prolog provides a general introduction to Prolog from a natural language perspective and discusses how to convert natural language statements and questions into Prolog facts, rules, and queries.
Chapter 3: Visual Prolog Programs covers Visual Prolog syntax, discusses the sections of a Visual Prolog program, and introduces programming in Visual Prolog.
Chapter 4: Unification and Backtracking describes how Visual Prolog solves problems and assigns values to variables.
Chapter 5: Simple and Compound Objects discusses declaring and building structures in Visual Prolog.
Chapter 6: Repetition and Recursion explains how to write repetitive procedures using backtracking and recursion; also introduces recursive structures and trees.
Chapter 7: Lists and Recursion introduces lists and their use through recursion, as well as covers general list manipulation.
Chapter 8: The facts section discusses Visual Prolog's facts section for adding facts to your program at run time and for storing global information.
Chapter 9: Classes and Objects gives a short introduction to object oriented programming and introduces the object mechanism in Visual Prolog.
Chapter 10: Arithmetic and Comparison introduces the full range of arithmetic and comparison functions built into Visual Prolog and gives examples that demonstrate how to use them.
Chapter 11: Advanced Techniques controlling the flow analysis, using reference variables, pointers to predicates, the binary domain, term conversions, using the dynamic cut, tools and techniques for error and signal handling, and programming style for efficient programs.
Chapter 12: Writing, Reading, and Files introduces I/O in Visual Prolog; covers reading and writing, and file- and directory-handling.
Chapter 13: String-Handling in Visual Prolog covers string manipulation, including string comparison and string conversion, plus constructing and parsing strings.
Chapter 14: The External Database System covers Visual Prolog's external database system: chained data, B+ trees, storing data (in EMS, conventional memory, and hard disk), and sorting data. Includes examples of constructing real database applications.
Chapter 15: System-Level Programming introduces the low-level control supported within Visual Prolog: system calls, BIOS, low-level memory addressing, and bit manipulation.
Chapter 16: Example Prolog Programs provides a diverse group of Prolog program examples demonstrating some of the elegant ways Prolog solves complex problems.
Chapter 17 Elements of the Language gives a systematic overview of all the features in the Visual Prolog language. The chapter also introduces modular programming.
Chapter 18 Interfacing with Other Languages gives a describtion on how to interface with C and other languages