<HTML> <HEAD> <LINK rel="stylesheet" href="lpdoc.css" type="text/css"> <TITLE>The Ciao System Manuals -- Global Index</TITLE> </HEAD> <BODY> <LOCALHEADER> <DIV class="boxedtitle"> <H1 class="title"><EM>The Ciao System Manuals</EM></H2> <H2>Global Index</H2> </DIV> <P> This is a global index of the manuals of the different major components of the Ciao Prolog Development System. Depending on the particular formats installed, these manuals can be accessed by various methods such as using a standard WWWW browser, typing <tt>M-x info</tt> inside the <tt>emacs</tt> editor, using the GNU <tt>info</tt> command, using a pdf viewer such as <tt>xpdf</tt> or <em>acrobat reader</em>, using a postscript visualizer such as <tt>ghostscript</tt>, using a dvi visualizer such as <tt>xdvi</tt>, using the Un*x <tt>man</tt> command, etc. The latest version of the different components can be downloaded from <A href="http://www.clip.dia.fi.upm.es/Software">the CLIP Software repository</A>. <p> <h2>The following is the list of available manuals:</h2> <UL><LI><A HREF="#ciao"><B class=applname>ciao:</B> <B><em>The Ciao Prolog System</em></B></A></UL> <A NAME="ciao"></A><HR> <H1 class=appltitle><B class=applname>ciao:</B> <em>The Ciao Prolog System</em></H1> <p> <b>Ciao</b> is a <i>public domain</i>, <i>next generation</i> multi-paradigm programming environment with a unique set of features: <p><p><UL> <p><LI>Ciao offers a complete Prolog system, supporting <i>ISO-Prolog</i>, but its novel modular design allows both <i>restricting</i> and <i>extending</i> the language. As a result, it allows working with <i>fully declarative subsets</i> of Prolog and also to <i>extend</i> these subsets (or ISO-Prolog) both syntactically and semantically. Most importantly, these restrictions and extensions can be activated separately on each program module so that several extensions can coexist in the same application for different modules. <p><LI>Ciao also supports (through such extensions) programming with functions, higher-order (with predicate abstractions), constraints, and objects, as well as feature terms (records), persistence, several control rules (breadth-first search, iterative deepening, ...), concurrency (threads/engines), a good base for distributed execution (agents), and parallel execution. Libraries also support WWW programming, sockets, external interfaces (C, Java, TclTk, relational databases, etc.), etc. <p><LI><b>Ciao</b> offers support for <i>programming in the large</i> with a robust module/object system, module-based separate/incremental compilation (automatically --no need for makefiles), an assertion language for declaring (<i>optional</i>) program properties (including types and modes, but also determinacy, non-failure, cost, etc.), automatic static inference and static/dynamic checking of such assertions, etc. <p><LI><b>Ciao</b> also offers support for <i>programming in the small</i> producing small executables (including only those builtins used by the program) and support for writing scripts in Prolog. <p><LI>The <b>Ciao</b> programming environment includes a classical top-level and a rich emacs interface with an embeddable source-level debugger and a number of execution visualization tools. <p><LI>The <b>Ciao</b> compiler (which can be run outside the top level shell) generates several forms of architecture-independent and stand-alone executables, which run with speed, efficiency and executable size which are very competitive with other commercial and academic Prolog/CLP systems. Library modules can be compiled into compact bytecode or C source files, and linked statically, dynamically, or autoloaded. <p><LI>The novel modular design of Ciao enables, in addition to modular program development, effective global program analysis and static debugging and optimization via source to source program transformation. These tasks are performed by the <b>Ciao preprocessor</b> (<tt>ciaopp</tt>, distributed separately). <p><LI>The <b>Ciao</b> programming environment also includes <tt>lpdoc</tt>, an automatic documentation generator for LP/CLP programs. It processes Prolog files adorned with (<b>Ciao</b>) assertions and machine-readable comments and generates manuals in many formats including <tt>postscript</tt>, <tt>pdf</tt>, <tt>texinfo</tt>, <tt>info</tt>, <tt>HTML</tt>, <tt>man</tt>, etc. , as well as on-line help, ascii <tt>README</tt> files, entries for indices of manuals (<tt>info</tt>, WWW, ...), and maintains WWW distribution sites. <p></UL> <p><b>Ciao</b> is distributed under the GNU Library General Public License (LGPL). <p><p><p> <H2>Current version (1.10#8 of 2007/1/28):</H2> <UL class=htmlindex><LI> <A HREF=ciao_html/ciao_toc.html> <B class=applname>ciao</B> Reference Manual - html</A></UL> <UL class=htmlindex><LI> <A HREF=ciao.info><B class=applname>ciao</B> Reference Manual - gnu info</A></UL> <UL class=htmlindex><LI> <A HREF=manl/ciao.l><B class=applname>ciao</B> Unix man entry (source)</A></UL> <UL class=htmlindex><LI> <A HREF=ciao.pdf><B class=applname>ciao</B> Reference Manual - pdf</A></UL> <p><hr><p><b>Last modified on:</b> Thu Sep 10 13:18:43 EDT 2009.<p> <P> <BR> </BODY> </HTML>
