Re: Ann: SWI-Prolog 7.1.9

Hi Jose,

On 02/27/2014 05:20 PM, Jose F. Morales wrote:
> On Thu, Feb 27, 2014 at 11:03 AM, Jan Wielemaker <[email protected]
> <mailto:[email protected]>> wrote:
>
>     Hi Jos,
>
>     On 02/27/2014 12:38 AM, Jos De Roo wrote:
>
>         Hi Jan,
>
>         With the attached file graph.n3p we get
>         $ swipl -f graph.n3p -g halt
>         % graph.n3p compiled 2.21 sec, 100,103 clauses
>
>         Compared to version 6.6.1 this is a speed drop of 38%
>         $ swipl -f graph.n3p -g halt
>         % graph.n3p compiled 1.60 sec, 100,103 clauses
>
>
>     The original file didn't make it to the list because of
>     the long attachment, but that doesn't matter too much.
>
>     Yes, compilation in 7.x is slower.  This is because there
>     is more support for term/goal expansion/4, which includes
>     translation the source location information.  The second
>     reason is that the functional notation support requires
>     analyzing the source in more depth.
>
>     If you want best speed for loading big Prolog data files,
>     load them using a read/assert loop and finally call
>     compile_predicates/1 to make the code static.  So,
>
>
> Hi Jan,
>
> Congratulations for the new release.

It is just the week/biweek development cycle :-)  Although 7.1.x is
maturing.

> Is functional notation optional? (in the sense of module/3 declarations
> of Ciao)
> If so, does disabling functional notation alleviate compilation
overheads?

It is not optional (well, there is --traditional). I think that the Ciao
modular and strict architecture is a great piece of engineering. I
prefer to keep things `just available' though. That approach surely has
disadvantages, but quite likely it contributed a lot in the popularity
of the system.

> Is there any subset of SWI functional notation that is compatible with
> Ciao's fsyntax?

If I recall well, the body of functions definitions is in part a subset
of Ciao's syntax. Calling them is based on the . and dict datatype. That
also required a different way to specify the head of a function
definition. I think the envisioned role of SWI-Prolog functions is quite
different. They are primarily a way to access structured data, as
opposed to create a language with full functional notation.  I always
considered access to structured data one of the main obstacles for
programming in Prolog.

I've just used dicts and functional notation to deal with the state in a
new library for parsing RDFa.  It is ugly Prolog, mainly because the RDFa
spec is purely procedural and requires a mutable state.  Still, I think
that dicts and functional notation allowed creating a reasonable readable
implementation of this `procedure'.

	Cheers --- Jan