Preferred Prolog development tools

[jjtolton]

I'd be curious to know what tools everyone is using for Prolog development.

For instance, coming from lisp/emacs, I do not think I would have even approached Prolog were it not for Prolog mode and Ediprolog. I am interested in implementing the Prolog lsp-server integration. However, I was really surprised to find the excellent autocomplete in the Scryer terminal! That's great for discoverability!

I know some other non-compliant Prolog variants have their own tools but this is a Scryer board so if we could stick to Vegan Prolog tools that we can use with Scryer that would certainly be preferable! That being said I think they would be very helpful from the standpoint of "this is something missing that would be really great to have", then we can start working towards it!

[jjtolton]

Be honest who's using notepad++ with the terminal?

[bakaq]

There are treesitter grammars for Prolog, but you probably need to configure them manually. I use Neovim with this one.

[ocharles]

Ah good to know! I had found some but wasn't sure quite what state they were in. If you have luck with this one I'll configure helix to use it, and push that upstream

[bakaq]

Since I configured to use this one (it's mostly fine), upstream nvim-treesitter has adopted this other one. I haven't used it yet to know if it's better, but this is an alternative to consider.

[hurufu]

I've never heard about tree-sitter before and Prolog vim plugin that I use although do even highlight some errors in Prolog code, is far from ideal. Tree-sitter seems to be bundled with vim-clap plugin.

[jjtolton]

Interesting. I was looking at the tree-sitter documentation -- seems like it should be the most obvious task in the world to write a prolog parser for isocompliant prolog. 🤔

[hurufu]

Diadem might be useful, but it isn't merged yet into mainline Scryer.

[jjtolton]

Is this an editing tool..?

[triska]

@hurufu: Yes indeed, very promising!

The usefulness of library(diadem) is also strongly related to goal expansion (also discussed in #2433). For instance, arithmetic constraints are heavily goal expanded and become very hard to read and reason about by library(diadem). It is really worth rethinking how goal expansion should work.

[hurufu]

Is this an editing tool..?

No, but it is way cooler, it can exactly pin-point a place and tell you why your goal is failing. I think it counts as a "development tool".

[jjtolton]

Is this an editing tool..?

No, but it is way cooler, it can exactly pin-point a place and tell you why your goal is failing. I think it counts as a "development tool".

Ohh that IS a good tool! That almost sounds like a mini-expert-system!