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News in Visual Prolog 5.0

In this section we present all the exiting new features of Visual Prolog 5.0.

Debugger

Visual Prolog 5.0 Professional version finally contains a debugger ! The debugger is quite impressive! It is fast, and it allows you to inspect variable values and asserted facts. The debugger works on the linked executables, the compiler generates the debug information in .DEB files in the .OBJ directory. The debugger is currently a standalone program. The debugger supports currently only WIN32, it is expected to be ported to OS/2, but not to WIN16 !

Enhancements in VDE

Speed improvement of Compiling + Linking
Feature to easily find Runtime errors: They can now be registered on the clipboard from the error dialog, and a VDE Menu command Alt->F2 places the cursor at the position of the error.
.RCImport under OS/2.
Help Maker can now import links from RTF files and or HAM bases.
Project sharing and Source control. The 5.0 version makes it possible to use source controls systems like PVCS, MKS and MS-SourceSafe, and makes it easy to share resources between several projects as well as allowing multiple programmers to work on the same project. Visual Prolog can now handle the resources outside the .VPR files so different people can put a lock on different resources while they are working with these.

Improvements in Compiler

Support for Objects and Classes. You can find a description in the on-line help under the Language -> Using Classes and Objects.
Possibility to declare predicates as determ, nondeterm, but now also as procedure, failure, erroneous and multi. This enables the compiler to check for dangerous fail possibilities in expected procedurel code.
A number of extra checking possibilities for the compiler for unused local predicates, dangerous automatic type conversions etc.
New predicates errorexit to invoke runtime errors with position remembering.
New compiler's directive #error to invoke a compilation error from the source code.

New Linker

Visual Prolog 5.0 now contain a new linker. So Visual Prolog can now Build programs for all platforms without use of a C compiler.

New VPI Features

More than 55 new VPI predicates, among these features for:

New VPI events for handling custom controls: font changes, Title changes, Enabling, Disabling, Invisibilization, Visibilization.
Feature to customize the MDI Window menu.
Print preferences chosen from dlg_printsetup can be stored for future use.
New predicate lbox_SetTopIndex( Win, Index ) determines the top displayed element for a listbox.
Support for Control Subclassing and superclassing directly in VPI.
Support for dialogs in Child windows.
pict_Load() can now load icons.
A predicate to change Icon in upper left corner of window.(win95, NT 4, OS/2).
Clipboard support for metafiles has been added.

New VPI Tools

VIP tools has been moved to subdirectories under VPI\Include .

DATE New DATE tool
DATECUST custom control to edt dates
MAPCTRL New GIS tool.
PROPERTY New Property list editor.
TABLEED nice tool to browse and edit data, see the demo program.

Internet Support

Visual Prolog 5.0 contains many features that make it easy to create Internet applications.

Bindings to Sockets
This contains basic bindings as well as a higher level interface that makes it easier and safer to use Sockets. Sockets is the API to the TCP/IP protocol that can be used to establish a communication between programs over the Internet as well as internally in a network or between two programs on the same computer.

FTP Support
VIP 5.0 contains API and example programs that show how it is possible to use the Internet File Transfer Protocol to send and receive Files from an Internet server.

HTTP Support
VIP 5.0 contains API and example programs that demonstrate the use of the Internet HyperText Transfer Protocol. This is the basic protocol used by the World Wide Web. This API can be used to create WWW client and server utilities as well as Internet Agents in Visual Prolog.

CGI Support + Examples
This CGI support shows how it is possible to create Visual Prolog programs that generate dynamic WEB pages.

ISAPI Support and Examples
The support of the ISAPI allows high performance scripts on the Microsoft Information Server or any other HTTP Server that supports the ISAPI interface..

DOC Tools subdirectory
This tool gives an abstraction of handling documents. Using a Prolog structure makes it possible to be independent of the actual format whether it is .RTF,. HTML or .IPF. There are both generations of these three formats as well as import from these formats. This tool opens up for many application possibilities like generation of Word documents, Internet assistants etc.

Communication with JAVA applets
Some examples illustrate how it is possible to have a Prolog server that communicates with a JAVA applet.

Support for SCO & LINUX

The Professional version of Visual Prolog contains a command-line compiler so it is possible to create command-line textmode utilities to run under SCO UNIX and LINUX.

Full OS/2 support

Visual Prolog 5.0 now fully runs and supports OS/2 Presentation Manager. VPI Programs can easily be recompiled to run under OS/2 PM. We can not guarantee that every VPI program will look equally under Windows and OS/2, but as far as we know, there are no other programming tool that gives such a wide portability as Visual Prolog. Visual Prolog under OS/2 can now be used without buying a C compiler.

New conversion utility can be found in the BIN directory for each platform. It helps in the conversion Win16 (32) Projects to OS/2 and back. Conversions of the .VPR and .HAM files to the text representation and back also supported by this utility.

ODBCBIND

In addition to the portable SQLBIND subdirectory, we have added full bindings to the ODBC API allowing Windows applications to take advantage of all the features in the ODBC API.

ESTA

The PDC expert system shell ESTA has been reprogrammed to the VPI layer and included, with source code, in Visual Prolog version 5.0.

PIE

The Prolog Inferenge Engine is now supplied as an example with a VPI GUI so it can be used as a standalone Prolog Interpreter.

New example programs

VPI\TOOLEXAM\BUILD How to include debugger and compiler in your application to dynamically compile rules.
Example how to generate a TimeLock version of your program (You need to buy the TimeLock library)
VPI\Programs\TanGram Game
VPI\Programs\LabelEXP label printing program.

Miscellaneous improvements

Copyfile predicate changed so it will copy the file attributes as well.
Support for VPI applications in .DLLs.
New PDCRUNT.PRE with portable declarations for extra predicates in PROLOG.LIB.
+ 1000 small improvements and bugfixes