Traditionally, programme developoment in Prolog, like LISP and other interprer
oriented languages used in Artifical Intelligence and Computational
Linguistics, proceeds in dialogue mode. That is, the interpreter is
called, and all programme editing and testing processes take place within the
interpreter environment itself. The interpreter environment may then be saved
as a "saved state".
Development in compiler oriented languages, such as Pascal or C, proceeds in
batch mode: the programme is written separately from the compiler
environment and then translated in toto into executable code, and run
without interaction with the programmer (naturally, interaction with a user may
be provided, and this may also be the programmer).
Batch mode development in Prolg also has advantages: it is more conducive to
the development of well-documented code, and to modular development. In
practice, much Prolog development proceeds in this way.
In a UNIX environment, using for instance Sicstus Prolog, the command
sicstus -l myfile.pl 2> /dev/null
permits the use of Prolog in this way: the programme is in "myfile.pl" and any
Prolog comment output is directed to the empty file, sending only relevant
output to the console.
Under Win95 techniques are somewhat different, and special environments for
languages such as Visual C have been developed in order to facilitate programme
development. This note is intended to permit construction of a simple but
effective working environment for standard Prolog develoopment using DOS boxes
(MS-DOS command line windows).