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Introduction

ProTcXl (pronounced pro-tixel) is a graphical interface for Prolog, in particular for ECLiPSe . It connects Prolog with the Tcl/Tk toolkit [2] and with the X11 library Xlib [1]. ProTcXl defines a set of Prolog predicates and Tcl/Tk commands which make it possible to execute Tcl/Tk statements and Xlib functions from Prolog and to call Prolog predicates from Tcl/Tk.

The name of the first ProTcXl version was ProTcl, because it simply offered an interface between Prolog and Tcl. During the development of graphical user interfaces for several data-intensive programs we have hit the speed limits of the Tk toolkit and this is why we have decided to extend ProTcl with a direct interface to the X11 library Xlib, which is able to perform simple display operations very fast. A combination of these two graphical interfaces is quite powerful and we expect it to satisfy the requirements of most GUI applications.

This document describes ProTcXl basic and advanced usage. It is up to a large extent self-contained, no prior knowledge of Tcl/Tk is needed, but the knowledge of Prolog is assumed. Readers familiar with Tcl/Tk can skip the first introductory chapters which are meant only for Tcl/Tk beginners, and to refresh the sources of most Tcl programming mistakes. As this report cannot cover the functionality of Xlib, we limit ourselves to several examples to illustrate its usage in ProTcXl and to the description of several self-contained predicates. Xlib experts can build on them, and non-experts can use them verbatim to obtain satisfactory results.





next up previous index
Next: Why Tcl/Tk? Up: ProTcXl 2.1 User Previous: ProTcXl 2.1 User



Micha Meier
Tue Jul 2 09:49:39 MET DST 1996