On the Portability of Prolog Applications

Jan Wielemaker and Vítor Santos Costa

January 2011

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Abstract

The non-portability of Prolog programs is widely considered one of the main problems facing Prolog programmers. Although since 1995, the core of the language is covered by the ISO standard 13211-1, this standard has not been sufficient to support large Prolog applications. As an approach to address this problem, since 2007, YAP and SWI-Prolog have established a basic compatibility framework. The aim of the framework is running the same code on Edinburgh-based Prolog systems rather than having to migrate an application. This article describes the implementation and evaluates this framework by studying how it can be used on a number of libraries and an important application.

Bibtex

@InProceedings{wielemaker-padl11,
  author =    {J. Wielemaker and V. Santos Costa},
  title =     {{On the Portability of Prolog Applications}},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 13th International Symposium on Practical Aspects of Declarative
               Languages (PADL 2011)},
  number =    {6539},
  series =    {LNCS},
  publisher = {Springer},
  editor =    {R. Rocha and J. Launchbury},
  month =     {January},
  year =      {2011},
  address =   {Austin, Texas, USA},
}

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