- phrase(+Phrase, ?List)
-
This predicate is true iff the list List can be parsed as a phrase
(i.e. sequence of terminals) of type Phrase. Phrase can be
any term which would
be accepted as a nonterminal of the grammar (or in general, it can
be any grammar rule body), and must be instantiated to a
nonvariable term at the time of the call; otherwise an error
message is sent to the standard error stream and the predicate fails.
This predicate is the usual way to commence execution of grammar rules.
If List is bound to a list of terminals by the time of the call,
then the goal corresponds to parsing List as a phrase of type
Phrase; otherwise if List is unbound, then the grammar
is being used for generation.
- phrase(+Phrase, ?List, ?Rest)
-
This predicate is true iff the segment between the start of list
List and the start of list Rest can be parsed as a phrase
(i.e. sequence of terminals) of type Phrase . In other words, if
the search for phrase
Phrase is started at the beginning of list List, then
Rest is what remains unparsed after Phrase has been
found. Again, Phrase can be any term which
would be accepted as a nonterminal of the grammar (or in general, any
grammar rule body), and must be instantiated to a nonvariable term
at the time of the call; otherwise an error message is sent to the
standard error stream and the predicate fails.
Predicate phrase/3 is the analogue of call/1 for grammar
rule bodies, and provides a semantics for variables in the bodies of
grammar rules. A variable X in a grammar rule body is treated
as though phrase(X) appeared instead, X would expand into
a call to phrase(X, L, R) for some lists L and R.
- expand_term(+Term1, ?Term2)
-
This predicate is used to transform terms that appear in a Prolog program
before the program is compiled or consulted.
The standard transformation performed by expand_term/2 is that
when Term1 is a grammar rule, then Term2 is the corresponding
Prolog clause; otherwise Term2 is simply Term1 unchanged. If
Term1 is not of the proper form, or Term2 does not unify with
its clausal form, predicate expand_term/2 simply fails.
Users may override the standard transformations performed by predicate
expand_term/2 by defining their own compile-time transformations.
This can be done by defining clauses for the predicate
term_expansion/2.
When a term Term1 is read in when a file is being compiled or
consulted, expand_term/2 calls term_expansion/2 first;
if the expansion succeeds, the transformed term so obtained is used and
the standard grammar rule expansion is not tried; otherwise, if
Term1 is a grammar rule, then it is expanded using dcg/2;
otherwise, Term1 is used as is. Note that predicate
term_expansion/2 must be defined in the XSB's default read-in
module ( usermod) and should be loaded there before the compilation
begins.
- 'C'(?L1, ?Terminal, ?L2)
-
This predicate generally is of no concern to the user. Rather it is used
in the transformation of terminal symbols in
grammar rules and expresses the fact that L1 is connected
to L2 by the terminal Terminal. This predicate is
needed to avoid problems due to source-level
transformations in the presence of control primitives such as
cuts ( '!'/0), or if-then-elses
( '->'/2) and is defined by the single clause:
'C'([Token|Tokens], Token, Tokens).
The name 'C' was chosen for this predicate so that another useful
name might not be preempted.
- dcg(+DCG_Rule, ?Prolog_Clause)
- dcg
Succeeds iff the DCG rule DCG_Rule translates to the Prolog
clause Prolog_Clause. At the time of call, DCG_Rule
must be bound to a term whose principal functor is '->'/2
or else the predicate fails. dcg/2 must be explicitly
imported from the module dcg.
