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SWI-Prolog datatypes

This document lists the SWI-Prolog datatypes and relevant information such as their limits. It is mostly intended for programs that want to examine and/or exchange arbitrary SWI-Prolog data.

Classical Prolog types

This section discusses the types that are found in any Prolog system.

Variable

Prolog variables are logical variables. Variables do not have a fixed identity, such as a name or a permanent address. In particular, the printed `name' of a variable may change due to garbage collection. This is illustrated in the session below:

?- A = x(X), writeln(X), garbage_collect, writeln(X).
_G1600
_G1
A = x(X).

Integer

Prolog integers are by default unbounded. Large integers live on the global (or term) stack and thus the maximum integer is dictated by the available stack space. If SWI-Prolog was build without large integer support, they are represented as 64-bit integers, also on 32-bit hardware. From a Prolog point of view, all integers are uniform. The foreign language interface provides functions to exchange integers in various formats.

Floats

Prolog floats are represented as C doubles. In practice, this means they are 64-bit IEEE doubles on all relevant platforms we are aware of.

Atoms

Prolog atoms are unique handles to a string of Unicode characters. There is no length limit and all Unicode code points, including zero (0) are allowed. The maximum number of atoms that can be accommodated in a single Prolog process is 2^25 (33554432) on 32-bits machines (2^57 on 64-bit machines).

Windows: Unicode atoms are stored using the C-type wchar_t, which is 16 bit on Windows (32-bit on most other platforms). This means that Unicode strings can only hold characters in the range 0..65535. SWI-Prolog is not aware of UTF-16 surrogate pairs. Therefore, both members of the pair count as distinct characters to atom_codes/2, etc.

Compound terms

Compound terms consist of a name (atom), and N arguments, each of which may be an arbitrary Prolog data item. In standard Prolog, N is at least one. In SWI-Prolog, N can be zero. The number of arguments is limited to 2^32, which implies limited by memory only on 32-bit hardware, but limited on 64-bit hardware. Note that this limit can be lifted fairly easily if the need arises.

SWI-Prolog extensions

SWI-Prolog provides the following extensions and modifications to the standard Prolog datatypes:

Blobs

Blobs are a super-type of atoms. Two blob types implement normal text atoms: text (ISO-Latin-1 atoms) and ucs_text (Unicode atoms). The type test atom/1 succeeds only on these two. The other blob types are typically used as handles. Currently, the following blob types exist:

stream
Used to represent handles to streams
clause
Used to represent handles to clauses (asserta/2, etc.)
record
Used to represent handles to database records (recorda/3, etc.).
reserved_symbol
Reserved symbols. Currently only [].

Future versions are likely to introduce more blobs, notably to reference global objects such as threads or mutexes. Note that foreign libraries may define additional blob types, so code that wish to be able to process arbitrary Prolog terms should not make assumptions on the defined blob types.

Strings

As atoms, strings are sequences of Unicode code points. They have the same limits as atoms, except for the maximum length. As strings live on the global stack, their lenght is limited by the available stack space. In addition, the size of a string in memory is limited to 2^25 (33554432) on 32-bits machines or 2^57 on 64-bit machines. Note that ISO-Latin-1 strings require one byte per character and unicode strings require 4 (2 on Windows, see Atoms above) bytes per character.

Nil ([], empty list)

In SWI-Prolog version 7, [] is not an atom. It is a unique constant that is only equivalent to itself. The foreign interface provides dedicated functions to deal with the empty list (PL_is_nil(), PL_unify_nil(), etc.)

List cons-cell

In SWI-Prolog version 7, the list cons-cell is a term '[|]'(Head,Tail) rather than .(Head,Tail).

Dictionaries

SWI-Prolog version 7 provides the dict type. See Dicts: structures with named arguments for details. Dicts are not yet supported by the foreign library interface. Dicts are currently a subtype of compound, which implies that e.g., compound/1, =../2, etc., work on them. User code should not make assumptions on this. Notably code must test for dicts and process the dict with dict predicates, before testing for compounds.

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