Using SWI-Prolog for studying Prolog

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The vast majority of downloads for SWI-Prolog concerns students using it for their Prolog language course. This wiki page is intended to collect tricks and tips for using SWI-Prolog for teaching.

Development environment

Options (FIXME: elaborate)

Native (swipl-win + PceEmacs)
Using SWI-Prolog Editor (Windows only)
Using Eclipse PDT pluggin
Using GNU-Emacs ediprolog pluggin

Customization

If you use a centrally installed copy of SWI-Prolog, you can customize it by editing swipl.rc and/or swipl-win.rc, which can be found in the root directory of the installation. Students may add these to their personal initialization file, which can be installed and edited using the built-in editor by first running emacs/0 as below and then using the menu Edit/Prolog preferences

?- emacs.

Below are some useful settings:

:- set_prolog_flag(occurs_check, error).

This flag prevents users from creating infinite (cyclic) trees. For example, the code below will now raise an error instead of failing silently.

    ...,
    A = A+1

:- set_prolog_stack(local, limit(4000000)).

By limiting the local (environment) stack to 4 Mb, unbounded recursion will quickly terminate with a resource error.

:- load_files(library(clpfd), [silent(true)]).

This makes library(clpfd) available to your students, which allows for transparent monotonic arithmetic. With this, students can learn to appreciate declarative programming to perform more realistic tasks.