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The trace processing of the functor 'flatten2' with input list: "[4, [3, [2, [1,[ ] ] ] ] ]" (Screenshot of the tracing process)
The above is the screenshot of me calling functor flatten2 with input list "[4, [3, [2, [1,[ ] ] ] ] ]", and a variable 'X'.
The below is the function that I was tracing, stolen from this question: Flatten a list in Prolog.
So my essential question is that during the recursion, what happens to the variable X and its value? Why is the 'X' showed as '_295' in the "call 1", how does prolog grammar calculating this value?
flatten2([], []) :- !.
flatten2([L|Ls], FlatL) :-
!,
flatten2(L, NewL),
flatten2(Ls, NewLs),
append(NewL, NewLs, FlatL).
flatten2(L, [L]).
X is just a local name for "globally visible stuff" that is held in the "term store".
X designates (or names or denotes) either:
Concrete content: A term, which a generally tree. The variable is called "bound" or "instantiated". The leaves of the tree are either concrete content (atoms, numbers etc.) or cells with no content (see below). The inner nodes are called compound terms. If X designates a term, then the query nonvar(X) succeeds. When X is printed, it "disappears": The content is printed instead.
A cell with no content (I like to call this a "hole"), which is meant to be take up a term eventually. In that case the variable is called "unbound" or "uninstantiated". If X is such an unbound variable, i.e. if it designates a hole, then the query var(X) succeeds. When X is printed, its name is printed.
Confusingly (and I should add, rather sloppily), a "variable name" is commonly also called a "term". That's a Prolog tripmine, these two concepts should be held apart but they are not.
If you write your Prolog clause, you will use nice variable names.
flatten2(L, [L]).
Remember these variables names have no particular significance and they are local to the clause.
When Prolog runs, it has to pull new variable names that are distinct from any other names "out of the hat". These fresh variable names look like _295. Different implementations have different conventions here.
An example where new variable names have to be created to describe a list that contains a member foo somewhere (on at least one place). List templates of increasing length are generated. At each place of the list except the place holding foo (a concrete term), there is a "cell without content"/"hole". To express this, a random new variable name distinct from any other variable name is generated and printed. The variable name is probably directly derived from the hole address.
?- member(foo,L).
L = [foo|_23302] ;
L = [_23300, foo|_24038] ;
L = [_23300, _24036, foo|_24774] ;
L = [_23300, _24036, _24772, foo|_25510] ;
L = [_23300, _24036, _24772, _25508, foo|_26246] ;
L = [_23300, _24036, _24772, _25508, _26244, foo|_26982]
This is my first time using Prolog.
I have employees:
employee(eID,firstname,lastname,month,year).
I have units:
unit(uID,type,eId).
I want to make a predicate
double_name(X).
that prints the last names of the employees with the same first name in the unit X.
I am doing something like this :
double_name(X) :-
unit(X,_,_eID),
employee(_eID,_firstname,_,_,_),
_name = _firstname,
employee(_,_name,_lastname,_,_),
write(_lastname).
But it prints all the employees in the unit.
How can i print only the employees with the same name ?
unit(unit_01,type,1).
unit(unit_01,type,2).
unit(unit_01,type,3).
employee(1,mary,smith,6,1992).
employee(2,fred,jones,1,1990).
employee(3,mary,cobbler,2,1995).
double_name(Unit) :-
unit(Unit,_,Eid_1),
employee(Eid_1,Firstname,Lastname_1,_,_),
unit(Unit,_,Eid_2),
Eid_1 \= Eid_2,
employee(Eid_2,Firstname,Lastname_2,_,_),
write(Firstname),write(","),write(Lastname_1),nl,
write(Firstname),write(","),write(Lastname_2).
Variables in Prolog typically start with an upper case letter, but starting them with and underscore is allowed, but not typical.
In double_name/2 the predicates like
unit(Unit,_,Eid_1)
employee(Eid_1,Firstname,Lastname_1,_,_)
are used to load the values from the facts into variables while pattern matching (via unification) that the bound variables match with the fact.
To ensure that a person is not compared with themselves.
Eid_1 \= Eid_2
and to make sure that two people have the same first name the same variable is used: Firstname.
The write/1 and nl/0 predicates just write the result to the screen.
Example:
?- double_name(unit_01).
mary,smith
mary,cobbler
true ;
mary,cobbler
mary,smith
true ;
false.
Notice that the correct answer is duplicated. This can be resolved.
See: Prolog check if first element in lists are not equal and second item in list is equal
and look at the use of normalize/4 and setof/3 in my answer
which I leave as an exercise for you.
Given this program, why am I forced to define every atom in the predicate, even if they're anonymous. Why is it that undefined variables in a dict predicate aren't thought of as anonymous?
funt2(X) :-
X = point{x:5, y:6}.
evalfunt(point{x:5, y : 6}) :-
write('hello world!').
evalfunt(point{x:_, y : _} ) :-
write('GoodBye world!').
Why can't I just say
evalfunt(point{x:5}) :-
write('GoodBye world!').
^that won't match, by the way.
I may as well just use a structure if I have to define every possible value in the dict to use dicts.
What's the motivation here? Can I do something to make my predicate terse? I'm trying to define a dict with 30 variables and this is a huge roadblock. It's going to increase my program size by a magnitude if I'm forced to define each variables (anonymous or not).
Dict is just a complex data type, like tuple, which has data AND structure. If you have, for example two facts:
fact(point{x:5, y:6}).
fact(point{x:5}).
Then the query
fact(point{x:_}).
will match the second one, but not the first one.
And the query
fact(point{x:_, y:_}).
Will match the first one, but not the second.
Now, if you want to match facts of the form fact(point{x:_, y:_, z:_}) only by one specific field, you can always write a helper rule:
matchByX(X, P) :- fact(P), P=point{x:X, y:_, z:_}.
So having facts:
fact(point{x:5, y:6, z:1}).
fact(point{x:1, y:2, z:3}).
fact(point{x:2, y:65, z:4}).
and quering
matchByX(1, P).
will return:
P = point{x:1, y:2, z:3}
UPDATE:
Moreover, in SWI-Prolog 7 version the field names can be matched as well, so it can be written in much more generic way, even for facts with different structures:
fact(point{x:5, y:6, z:1}).
fact(point{x:1, y:2}).
fact(point{x:2}).
fact(point{x:2, y:2}).
matchByField(F, X, P) :- fact(P), P.F = X.
So query:
?- matchByField(x, 2, P).
P = point{x:2} ;
P = point{x:2, y:2}.
I was able to accomplish what I needed by doing the following
checkiffive(Y) :-
get_dict(x, Y, V), V=5.
You need to use the built in methods for unifying values from a dict.
Described in chapter 5.4 of the SWI prolog reference
http://www.swi-prolog.org/download/devel/doc/SWI-Prolog-7.1.16.pdf
I want to parse a logical expression using DCG in Prolog.
The logical terms are represented as lists e.g. ['x','&&','y'] for x ∧ y the result should be the parse tree and(X,Y) (were X and Y are unassigned Prolog variables).
I implemented it and everything works as expected but I have one problem:
I can't figure out how to parse the variable 'x' and 'y' to get real Prolog variables X and Y for the later assignment of truth values.
I tried the following rule variations:
v(X) --> [X].:
This doesn't work of course, it only returns and('x','y').
But can I maybe uniformly replace the logical variables in this term with Prolog variables? I know of the predicate term_to_atom (which is proposed as a solution for a similar problem) but I don't think it can be used here to achieve the desired result.
v(Y) --> [X], {nonvar(Y)}.:
This does return an unbound variable but of course a new one every time even if the logical variable ('x','y',...) was already in the term so
['X','&&','X'] gets evaluated to and(X,Y) which is not the desired result, either.
Is there any elegant or idiomatic solution to this problem?
Many thanks in advance!
EDIT:
The background to this question is that I'm trying to implement the DPLL-algorithm in Prolog. I thought it would by clever to directly parse the logical term to a Prolog-term to make easy use of the Prolog backtracking facility:
Input: some logical term, e.g T = [x,'&&',y]
Term after parsing: [G_123,'&&',G_456] (now featuring "real" Prolog variables)
Assign a value from { boolean(t), boolean(f) } to the first unbound variable in T.
simplify the term.
... repeat or backtrack until a assignment v is found so that v(T) = t or the search space is depleted.
I'm pretty new to Prolog and honestly couldn't figure out a better approach. I'm very interested in better alternatives! (So I'm kinda half-shure that this is what I want ;-) and thank you very much for your support so far ...)
You want to associate ground terms like x (no need to write 'x') with uninstantiated variables. Certainly that does not constitute a pure relation. So it is not that clear to me that you actually want this.
And where do you get the list [x, &&, x] in the first place? You probably have some kind of tokenizer. If possible, try to associate variable names to variables prior to the actual parsing. If you insist to perform that association during parsing you will have to thread a pair of variables throughout your entire grammar. That is, instead of a clean grammar like
power(P) --> factor(F), power_r(F, P).
you will now have to write
power(P, D0,D) --> factor(F, D0,D1), power_r(F, P, D1,D).
% ^^^^ ^^^^^ ^^^^
since you are introducing context into an otherwise context free grammar.
When parsing Prolog text, the same problem occurs. The association between a variable name and a concrete variable is already established during tokenizing. The actual parser does not have to deal with it.
There are essentially two ways to perform this during tokenization:
1mo collect all occurrences Name=Variable in a list and unify them later:
v(N-V, [N-V|D],D) --> [N], {maybesometest(N)}.
unify_nvs(NVs) :-
keysort(NVs, NVs2),
uniq(NVs2).
uniq([]).
uniq([NV|NVs]) :-
head_eq(NVs, NV).
uniq(NVs).
head_eq([], _).
head_eq([N-V|_],N-V).
head_eq([N1-_|_],N2-_) :-
dif(N1,N2).
2do use some explicit dictionary to merge them early on.
Somewhat related is this question.
Not sure if you really want to do what you asked. You might do it by keeping a list of variable associations so that you would know when to reuse a variable and when to use a fresh one.
This is an example of a greedy descent parser which would parse expressions with && and ||:
parse(Exp, Bindings, NBindings)-->
parseLeaf(LExp, Bindings, MBindings),
parse_cont(Exp, LExp, MBindings, NBindings).
parse_cont(Exp, LExp, Bindings, NBindings)-->
parse_op(Op, LExp, RExp),
{!},
parseLeaf(RExp, Bindings, MBindings),
parse_cont(Exp, Op, MBindings, NBindings).
parse_cont(Exp, Exp, Bindings, Bindings)-->[].
parse_op(and(LExp, RExp), LExp, RExp)--> ['&&'].
parse_op(or(LExp, RExp), LExp, RExp)--> ['||'].
parseLeaf(Y, Bindings, NBindings)-->
[X],
{
(member(bind(X, Var), Bindings)-> Y-NBindings=Var-Bindings ; Y-NBindings=Var-[bind(X, Var)|Bindings])
}.
It parses the expression and returns also the variable bindings.
Sample outputs:
?- phrase(parse(Exp, [], Bindings), ['x', '&&', 'y']).
Exp = and(_G683, _G696),
Bindings = [bind(y, _G696), bind(x, _G683)].
?- phrase(parse(Exp, [], Bindings), ['x', '&&', 'x']).
Exp = and(_G683, _G683),
Bindings = [bind(x, _G683)].
?- phrase(parse(Exp, [], Bindings), ['x', '&&', 'y', '&&', 'x', '||', 'z']).
Exp = or(and(and(_G839, _G852), _G839), _G879),
Bindings = [bind(z, _G879), bind(y, _G852), bind(x, _G839)].
I'm writing a program that adds the numbers of a list provided by the user, but, in case there is an string it gives me an error. How do I check if an element of the list is a string or a number?
Thanx
number/1 will tell you if an object is a number. atom/1 will tell you if an object is an atom, which I presume is what you mean by a string. If you meant a true string (list of character codes), then
string(Object) :-
forall(member(X, Object), number(X))
will do the trick.
All of these will fail in the presence of variables.
If your list contains strings that you want to read as numbers:
...maplist(convert_element, List, OnlyNumbers),
convert_element(Num, Num) :- number(Num).
convert_element(String, Num) :- number_codes(Num, String).
convert_element(Unknown, 0) :- throw(unknown(Unknown)).
throw could be replaced with a message...
number(10.0). % true
string("hello"). % true
I don´t know why the other answers are so complicated...