Porting Programs to plain ECLiPSe

If you want to use ECLiPSe to do further development of your application, it is probably advantageous to modify it such that it runs under plain ECLiPSe. In the following we summarise the main aspects that have to be considered when doing so.

• In general, it is almost always possible to add to your program a small routine that fixes the problem, rather than to modify the source of the application in many places. E.g. name clashes are easier fixed by using the local/1 declaration rather than to rename the clashing predicate in the whole application program.

• Due to lack of standardisation, some subtle differences in the syntax exist between Prolog systems. See A.4 for details. ECLiPSe has a number of options that make it possible to configure its behaviour as desired.

• ECLiPSe has the string data type which is not present in Prolog of the Edinburgh family. Double-quoted items are parsed as strings in ECLiPSe, while they are lists of integers in other systems and when the compatibility packages are used (cf. chapter 5.4).

• I/O predicates of the see and tell group are not builtins in ECLiPSe, but they are provided in the cio library. Call lib(cio) in order to have them available (cf. appendix A). Similarly for numbervars/3.

• In ECLiPSe, some builtins raise events in cases where they just fail in other systems, e.g. arg(1,2,X) fails in C-Prolog, but raises a type error in ECLiPSe. If some code relies on such behaviour, it is best to modify it by adding an explicit check like

          ..., compound(T), arg(N, T, X), ...
  

  Another alternative is to redefine the arg/3 builtin, using :/2 to access the original version:

  :- local arg/3.
  arg(N, T, X) :-
          compound(X),
  	eclipse_language:arg(N, T, X).
  

  A third alternative is to define an error handler which will fail the predicate whenever the event is raised. In this case:

  my_type_error(_, arg(_, _, _)) :- !, fail.
  my_type_error(E, Goal) :- error(default(E), Goal).
  :- set_error_handler(5, my_type_error/2).
  

• As the ECLiPSe compiler does not accept procedures whose clauses are not consecutive in a file, you have to load the library scattered.pl if you want to compile such procedures.