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Standard Programming Style

You should always document you Prolog programs in order that other people (or you, at some later date) can understand what they are meant to do. There aren't rigid guidelines for this but there is a reasonably well established set of conventions, which are as follows:

Consider, for example, the following documentation for memberchk/2: checks if

%   memberchk(+Element, +Set)
%   means the same thing, but may only be used to test whether a known
%   Element occurs in a known Set.  In return for this limited use, it
%   is more efficient when it is applicable.

memberchk(Element, [Element|_]) :- !.
memberchk(Element, [_|Rest]) :-
        memberchk(Element, Rest).

Note the use of % symbols at the start of lines which are comments. When loading a program, Prolog ignores everything from this symbol up to the end of the same line. Larger comments can be enclosed between \* and *\ symbols. In the memberchk/2 example, Element and Set are both allocated mode + because both need to be instantiated for the predicate to work as intended. Compare this to the definition of member/2 (below), where either of the two elements may be either instantiated or uninstantiated, as required, and are therefore given ? as their mode declarations.

%   member(?Element, ?Set)
%   is true when Set is a list, and Element occurs in it.  It may be used
%   to test for an element or to enumerate all the elements by backtracking.
%   Indeed, it may be used to generate the Set!

member(Element, [Element|_]).
member(Element, [_|Rest]) :-
        member(Element, Rest).

One final point about these examples. Notice that an underscore to represent an anonymous variable is used wherever the name of a variable is unimportant. How do you know that it is unimportant? If you see a clause in which a named variable appears only once then its name doesn't matter since it isn't matching to anything in the clause. For instance the first clause of member/2 could have been:

member(Element, [Element|Rest]).
but it isn't important to distinguish Rest with a special name, so the convention is to use an underscore. Many Prolog systems will generate warning messages when they find ``singleton'' variables, such as Rest in the example above. It is a good idea to get into the habit of using underscores to avoid these warning messages. That way, if you accidentally introduce a singleton variable ( e.g. by mistyping the name of a variable) you will always be able to spot it when you load the file and see the singleton warning message.



next up previous
Next: Prolog Terms Up: No Title Previous: Some Anatomy



Dave Stuart Robertson
Tue Jul 7 10:44:26 BST 1998