Input and outputs formats

Currently the Prolog system can read a pure-text input typed by the user. The output is then written, also in pure-text form, to the screen. Clearly this kind of interaction is quite unsatisfactory, because of the poorness of the ASCII character-set.

In order to overcome this disadvantage and ease the input/output of complex formulas and expressions, a user-friendly interface is being developed. Such a graphical interface should allow the user to type-in formulas using graphical L^ATEX-like symbols.

In doing this we exploited the useful integration facilities offered by SICStus Prolog [18] with respect to other programming languages. Figure 1 displays the start-up dialog of transIt, while Figure 2 displays a prototypical generic input dialog. All of the dialogs are realized using the Tcl/Tk toolkit [17].

The system also provides the possibility of processing a text file, as well as to generate a text file as output. As mentioned, through this feature it would be possible to produce input files for different deduction tools. Nevertheless, close integration with such systems is under consideration.