Language Dialects, ISO Prolog and Porting Prolog Applications

# Chapter 23 Language Dialects, ISO Prolog and Porting Prolog Applications

The ECLiPSe system has evolved from the Edinburgh family of Prolog systems, and thus shares many properties with other systems in the same tradition. It also supports the ISO Prolog Standard from 1995 and its 2005, 2012 and 2017 corrigenda.

However, the default programming language dialect used with ECLiPSe (known as eclipse_language) is a separate and unique dialect, which is the result of design decisions taken for conceptual, practical and occasionally historical reasons.

To run an application written in another Prolog dialect on ECLiPSe, one has basically two choices: Using a compatibility package, or modifying the program.

- Using compatibility language dialects
  - ISO Prolog
  - Compiler versus interpreter
- Porting programs to plain ECLiPSe
- Exploiting the features of ECLiPSe