|
Exploring Visual PrologNote: This page assumes that you have already installed Visual Prolog, so all the DOC files and Projects can be found on disk ! If you read this from the WEB, download and Install the Personal Edition to get hold in the actual files. Learning something new is not a sequential, straight forward process. Visual Prolog is a very large system with many corners, and few people will need to know all of its details. However, learning the basic of the Prolog language, building some Windows applications and trying the demo programs are not at all difficult! On the CD, we have supplied the full documentation for Visual Prolog in MS-Word files and on-line help. However it is not very convenient to read too much documentation on-screen so you might consider buying the printed manual in order to more easily explore Visual Prolog. You should first install Visual Prolog, preferably a default or full installation if you have enough hard disk free space available. If you install everything, you will have all of the files needed for the following exercises. There are a number of things you should look at to understand the capabilities and the potential of Visual Prolog. In the following, we outline some items, but you are quite free to choose the order in which you try these steps. However, you will probably not get to really know the tool until you have tried to solve a problem of you own with Visual Prolog. Also before exploring the examples and posibilities of Visual Prolog, you should take a quick look at the 1. Study some small Prolog programsThe following is a collection of smaller programs. In order not to complicate things they do not have a GUI (Graphical User Interface), and use only the readln and write predicates to communicate with the user. By looking at the source code and at what the programs does you can get an impression of the capabilities of the Prolog Language. The examples are found in the \EXAMPLES subdirectory. Before running the examples, you need to know a couple of thing about the Visual Development Environment (VDE). The following examples are supplied as projects with the EasyWin target (Use Project->Load to load the program, and use Project->Run to run it), but you can also open the .PRO source file directly into the Visual Prolog editor and then use the Ctrl+G hotkey to run the program in Goal Mode. Before starting you may wish to see more information about Using the Visual Prolog VDE Many of the examples mentioned below contain a HTML link to a project (.PRJ) file. If you set up a (Windows) association that connects files having a .PRJ extension to the bin\win\32\vip.exe file you will be able to open these projects by clicking on the link.
2. Study these examples, now with a Graphical User Interface.These are found in the VPI\PROGRAMS subdirectory. You must build these
applications yourself, Note to use the following HTML links, you must register bin\win\32\vip.exe as the program that is used to open .PRJ files. Before starting you may wish to see more information about Using the Visual Prolog VDE
3. Study our demo applications.The demo examples are supplied with source code only. You need to build these applications yourself, the procedure is: Project->Open and then Project -> Run. Note to use the following HTML links, you must register bin\win\32\vip.exe as the program for .PRJ files. Using the Visual Prolog VDE You can activate on-line help for the applications!
4. Take a quick look at the VPI Tools demo applicationsThese are found in the VPI\TOOLEXAMP subdirectory. You need to build these applications yourself, the procedure is: Project->Open and then Project -> Run. These projects illustrate the use of the portable tools implemented on top of the VPI layer. 5. Learn the Prolog languageOpen the Language tutorial under DOC\LANGUAGE.DOC 6. Follow the Guided Tour on how to create a VPI applicationFor this, you should open the getting started manual under DOC\GETSTART.DOC, and then follow the steps in the Guided Tour. 7. Learn the details of the Visual Prolog Development EnvironmentFor this, you should open the getting started manual under DOC\VDE.DOC, and read about the many facilities in the VDE. 8. Learn the details of the VPI layerFor this, you should open and read the getting started manual underDOC\VPI.DOC, and you should run the examples in the subdirectory VPI\EXAMPLES |