Literate Programming in Prolog?

[dcnorris]

I am sorely feeling the need for literate programming tools to use with Prolog. Specifically, I would like to be able to:

• Freely intersperse Prolog code (including top-level interactions) with LaTeX-formatted prose
• Scrape the Prolog code out of my text, and run as a top-level script overnight
• Assemble results of the above into an Appendix
• Deal cleanly with code that might be omitted from paper body, but must be included in the Appendix.

What are best practices here?

[dcnorris]

What I'm doing now BTW is to embed the sections of Prolog code within verbatim environments. (Where I don't want to exhibit the code in the paper, I place these blocks within an enclosing comment environment — which happens to be provided by the verbatim package, as distinct from the verbatim environment.)

Then I use

perl -ne 'print if /^\\begin{verbatim}/ .. /^\\end{verbatim}/' mypaper.tex > mypaper.pl

and then run mypaper.pl code in ediprolog.

[EricGT]

What are best practices here?

It sounds like you want interactive notebooks. See: Project Jupyter

SWI-Prolog has notebooks available in SWISH. Perhaps the same can be done for Scryer Prolog.

[dcnorris]

It sounds like you want interactive notebooks.

I'm familiar with the interactive notebook concept from Mathematica and wxMaxima at least. But what I feel the need for here is facilities more akin to those of R Markdown and similar 'reproducible research' tools focused on batch-type document processing. For example, the need to strip out Prolog code from the document (e.g., to present as Appendix) looks like knitr's purl concept or its predecessor Sweave's idea of 'tangling'.

Perhaps some of the needs encountered in this recent paper-writing process could be met by adding a Prolog language engine for knitr. But there are other needs besides which may be rather specific to Prolog, such as formatting interactive code on multiple lines for exhibits in the paper, while keeping it on one line as required [am I right that there are no continuation lines at the top level?] for actually executing it.

My sense is that the full solution must incorporate something like markup in the Prolog program text, plus special LaTeX facilities applied late with presentation in mind.

[david-sitsky]

In theory org-mode with emacs allows you to export documents to LaTeX/PDF that contain embedded code blocks (presumably prolog will work here) and can contain the results of running various blocks. Message ID: <mthom/scryer-prolog/repo-discussions/1252/comments/2088295@

…

github.com>

[dcnorris]

org-mode with emacs

If this integrates well with ediprolog, then this might offer a basis for prototyping the whole toolchain!

[william42]

That or setting up org-babel