Re: GNU Prolog documentation

Perhaps latex hackery with the pl-bips.tex file would be the quickest and most reliable way to get text nuggets to support a 'help' predicate.

Many (but not all) of the builtins are described starting with something like:

\subsubsection{\texttt{arg/3}}
\label{arg/3}
   \AddPBD{arg/3}

The \AddPBD{foo/N} construct specifically identifies each PrologBuiltinDescription in the .tex file. There ought to be some way to subvert the latex macros to get pl-bips.tex to emit the desired nuggets.


Lindsey

On Jun 25, 2013, at 5:56 AM, emacstheviking <[email protected]> wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> Does anybody know what would be the *best* way to slice and dice the documentation source files to produce "nuggets" per predicate?

> 
> As far as I can see, the gprolog runtime doesn't have apropos or help predicates like some other implementations so I have decided that as an aid to learning more I am going to try to implement them but of course they need access to the underlying documentation for the meat of the output.
> 
> I can see from the source distribution that the documentation is written using .tex files (I have used LaTeX for many many years) BUT would it be *easier* to pick apart the large single HTML file instead. The H4 tags carry the predicate name which is useful as a starting point.
> 
> I would like to have something like this:
> 
>     help(predicate).
> 
> Dump the relevant part of the help file to the console.
> 
> 
> I have written a "C" extension that wraps the dynamic link library calls (dlopen,dlcose etc) and so far that seems to show promise. I was toying with writing the actual implementation in C using libxml or something to scour the HTML file, on demand. My other approach would be to produce a "database" (bunch of files called predicatename.txt) and then just interpolate the filename from the help argument and do it that way. Whatever, with all programs it comes down to defining the data first!
> 
> I really like GNU Prolog, I started with SWIPL but it's too big a dung-ball for me right now. Ciao seems "ok" but again, too big a dung-ball. I like the lean and mean approach with GNU Prolog plus the opportunity to make it better with my own extensions.
> 
> Thanks,
> Sean Charles.
> 
> 
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