23.3  Exploiting the features of ECLⁱPS^e

When rewriting existing applications as well as when writing new programs, it is useful to bear in mind important ECLⁱPS^e features which can make programs easier to write and/or faster:

• Compiler features relevant for performance can be found in section 6.7.
• Use ECLⁱPS^e’s nonlogical storage facilities (section 10), which are usually more suitable to store permanent data than assert/1 is, and are usually faster.
• ECLⁱPS^e has a number of language extensions which make programming easier, see chapter 5.
• The predicates get_flag/2, get_flag/3, get_file_info/3, get_stream_info/3 and
  get_var_info/3 give a lot of useful information about the system and the data.
• The ECLⁱPS^e macros often help to solve syntactic problems (see chapter 13).
• The TkECLⁱPS^e GUI provides many features that should make developing programs easier than with the traditional tty interface.
• It is worth familiarising oneself with the debugger’s features, see chapter 15.
• ECLⁱPS^e is highly customizable, even problems which seemingly require modification of the ECLⁱPS^e sources can very often be solved at the Prolog level.