PROLOGIO

Much of a programmer's time can be spent in writing and modifying code to load and save data files. PROLOGIO is a utility that makes life easier, if your application's data needs look something like the following:

A PROLOGIO data file is an ASCII series of 'objects'. In fact, each object is a subset of the syntax for a term in the Prolog language, and a PROLOGIO file can be read into Prolog with a single command, but this is irrelevant for most purposes. Because these objects consist of a list of attribute-value pairs, parsed by a YACC/LEX grammar, attributes can be removed from or added to an object without 'breaking' the data format. A typical application will be written to deal with missing attribute values, supplying defaults instead, and so data I/O can be very robust, even though the application changes substantially over the months and years. Very old data files are likely to be useable, even though many bells and whistles have been added to the application.

Since the file is ASCII, and readable, it is possible to edit the data file directly if something goes wrong---a very useful fallback position. Also, one application's data file can be easily read by another's, encouraging the separation of a complex application into a suite of smaller tools.

PROLOGIO supplies a number of classes to manipulate these objects and whole databases of objects. A PROLOGIO database can be built up in memory and then dumped to a file with a single statement, and conversely, a data file can be loaded into memory with a single statement, and then picked apart.

Please refer to the separate PROLOGIO manual.