Prolog_Lecture12_Input／Output.pptVIP

04/11/04 AIPP Lecture 12: I/O Input/Output Artificial Intelligence Programming in Prolog Lecturer: Tim Smith Lecture 12 04/11/04 Input/Output in Prolog Input/output (I/O) is not a significant part of Prolog. Part of the reason for this is that the purpose of Prolog is declarative programming, and input/output is intrinsically about producing procedural side-effects. It is very hard to state what the logical reading of a Prolog program is when it contains I/O functions. The I/O facilities I will present here are relatively simple. Each implementation of Prolog has more advanced I/O facilities but these will not be covered in this course. As I/O is not a core part of Prolog you will not be examined upon it but you may need to use it in practical exercises. How I/O works in Prolog. At any time during execution of a Prolog program two files are ‘active’: a current input stream, and a current output stream. By default these are both set to user which means that all input will come from the user terminal (the shell window in which Sicstus is loaded) and all output will be sent to the user terminal (i.e. write to the screen). Multiple I/O streams can be initialised but only one input and one output can be ‘active’ at any time (i.e. be read from or written to). File-based I/O: write/1 We have already used Prolog’s default output predicate write/1. This prints a term to the current output stream. ?- write(c), write(u_l), write(8), write(r). cu_l8r ? writes to terminal by default. yes ?- write([a,b,c,d]). [a,b,c,d] yes It will only accept Prolog terms so strings must be enclosed within single quotation marks. ?- write(Hello World). ?- write(‘Hello World’). syntax error Hello World yes Formatting Output We can use built-in predicates to format the output: nl/0 = write a new line to the current output stream. tab/1 = write a specified number of white spaces to the current output stream. this prints single spaces not actual tab