Yesterday Jan Wielemaker published version 7.3.28 of SWI-Prolog. It comes with a new flag toplevel_mode
which might be especially useful to test and debug CHR programs. It was highlighted in the version announcements as follows:
After suggestion by Falco Nogatz, it is now possible to run the toplevel in recursive
mode such that global variables remain bound. Nice for teaching CHR. Not clear what the other use cases are. Use ?- set_prolog_flag(toplevel_mode, recursive).
to enable this.
Some insights on the discussion, implementation and usage of the new flag can be found in the related
GitHub issue. It can be used to have a persistent constraint store over multiple queries in the toplevel. This way it is possible to, e.g., use the classical
gcd/1
constraint solver incrementally for computing the greatest common divisor of numbers given on by one:
?- set_prolog_flag(toplevel_mode, recursive).
true.
?- gcd(24).
gcd(24).
?- gcd(42).
gcd(6).
?- X = 3.
X = 3,
gcd(6).
As seen in the last query, the contents of the constraint store are printed by default on every query. So, for more advanced usage, it might become handy to use the recursive toplevel mode with CHR’s flag
chr_toplevel_show_store
set to
false
and explicitly call the meta-predicate
chr_show_store/1
.