Exploiting ECLiPSe Features

When rewriting existing applications as well as when writing new programs, it is useful to bear in mind important ECLiPSe features which can make programs easier to write and/or faster:

• The maximum performance is obtained when calling nodbgcomp/0 at the beginning of the session, before compiling any program and loading any libraries.

• ECLiPSe arrays and global variables ( setval/2, getval/2) are usually more suitable to store permanent data than assert/1 is, and are usually faster. See also Chapter 8 in [17].

• There are various libraries that make the use of ECLiPSe features more straightforward, e.g. structures.pl, define.pl, ifdef.pl, apply_macros.pl, check.pl etc.

• The predicates get_flag/2, get_flag/3, get_file_info/3, get_stream_info/3, get_var_info/3 give a lot of useful information about the system and the data.

• The ECLiPSe macros often help to solve syntactic problems (see chapter ).

• The ECLiPSe debugger has also many useful commands (j, A, v, z, o, q, M) not available in other systems. See also chapter .

• Even problems which seemingly require modification of the ECLiPSe sources in order to change its behaviour, can very often be solved just at the Prolog level, by a combined use of available features. The Guide to Advanced Programming gives some examples, but there are many more possibilities than could be shown there.