pining for the good old days of yore

I'm helpign a new prolog programmer on IRC, who'se asking how to persist data they're adding
with assert at the top level. (and yes, I understand this is the road to perdition, and am
gently encouraging them away from it).

I have to admire his/her ingenuity. They're appending data, with the old Edinborough append/1,
to their prolog source file. 

They're reasonably asking if this has to be this hard. 

While the answer of course is 'yes, you're trying to use the system backwards.', there's a part of me that wishes at this moment that save_state still worked.

I wish it worked every so often.

Persistence is something that should be handled by little gnomes behind the scenes, as so much else is in the Prolog world.

I find myself in this same situation sometimes - wondering why I can't just hint the system how to persist the data, and have it do it. Isn't there a pretty, happy making solution for this?

And yes, I'm opening a can of worms here.