[YeGoblynQueenne]

That sucks. XSB is old code and I believe it was meant mostly as a proof of concept even at the time it was written. I doubt many people use it, even in research, nowadays.

I believe what triska meant about XSB is that it demonstrated the benefits of SLG resolution, by being a proof of concept like I say. So yes, XSB would be more of academic interest.

If you want a modern Prolog to play around with you should try Swi-Prolog. From the conclusion of your comment I'm assuming you haven't tried it because you wouldn't have trouble "getting up and running" in 10 minutes. Or 5 or so. Seriously, Swi's maintainers (triska is a contributor) have gone out of their way to make it useable.

Anyway, if you put in all this work to get XSB working I think you should definitely give Swi-Prolog a try. Sunk cost fallacy, innit.

Here's the link:

https://www.swi-prolog.org/Download.html

On windows, there's an installer. On Linux you can yum-install or apt-get etc an earlier version and try it out, then if you like it you can follow the Download page's links to figure out how to install a newer version (that does take a bit more work).

If you're stuck with Prolog, there's a discourse group, here:

https://swi-prolog.discourse.group/

People there are always happy to help newcomers (and will never send you to RTFM).

But be warned that learning Prolog is not easy. I help with markings and labs for Prolog courses at my university and students always have a hard time with it, until some things start to click.

EDIT: "halt." should work at any Prolog prompt. The "." is a statement terminator. You probably didn't get anything after "halt return" because you missed the dot.

EDIT II: Oh, I forget. You can try Swi-Prolog on Swish (Prolog notebooks):

https://swish.swi-prolog.org

So no need to install anything but keep in mind that some stuff is limited for security reasons (you can do a lot of damage with a language that lets you rewrite it on the fly).

[tastroder]

Much appreciated, I kind of got what triska meant (didn't realize they were a contributor to that project), I just wanted to highlight that this is a real barrier for adoption of these alternative stacks. I find this interesting enough to spend more than those 10 minutes when I have time, sure. It's just that a random dev on the search for some component to solve something in their stack likely wont.

Just gave the SWI implementation a try and that was honestly a much better experience and I could immediately jump on their getting started guides to get a feel. Thanks for the pointers as well, I've got a few colleagues that actively use prolog but good to see that there's an active community out there.

> EDIT: "halt." should work at any Prolog prompt. The "." is a statement terminator. You probably didn't get anything after "halt return" because you missed the dot.

Whoops. Yup, I think I might have, I was under the impression that dot in the documentation was the sentence delimiter.

(And btw, my bad about the Perl comment, I just realized when setting up the SWI one that they seem to share a file extension with Perl.)

[YeGoblynQueenne]

I agree, it's very bad to have to go through so much hassle when you just want to have a quick look to evaluate a possible tool for a problem you have right now. This is a difficult situation to resolve: usabiity won't improve until there's more users and until usability improves there won't be more users.

I'm glad you like Swi. It's not the fastest implementation but it's certainly the one with the largest community and the most quality-of-life features, documentation server, unit tests library, package manager etc. I love it :)

>> (And btw, my bad about the Perl comment, I just realized when setting up the SWI one that they seem to share a file extension with Perl.)

Oh yes, I totally forgot about that (can't say I use much perl!). It can look funny if you don't expect it :)

Anyway I hope you have time to look into the language more in the future. Like I say, it's hard to learn but it's worth the pain.