Information for SPIDER Beta Testers

Feedback

1. Crashing problems.
   Any crashes in Eclipse or SICStus Prolog that occurs when using SPIDER.
2. Installation problems.
   Any problems installing Eclipse or the SPIDER feature.
3. Performance issues.
   If SPIDER is slow or misbehaves for certain files or for large files etc.

   Note: The first thing to try if SPIDER is slow, is to increase the memory allocated to Eclipse. See memory issues, for more information.

4. Broken or incomplete functionality.
   If something does not work right. Note that there are a number of known incomplete features.
5. Missing features.
   If some must-have functionality is missing. Note that there are a number of known missing features that we intend to add.
6. Other suggestions.
   Any other feedback, including suggestions for new functionality, icon design and other eye candy, etc.

• Open Call Hierarchy does not work for files that are not part of a project. A workaround is to create a prolog project and add a link to your source directory, as described under Work With Existing Prolog Code.
• Avoid symbolic links. Symbolic links can lead to all kinds of trouble, especially when they create cycles. This is a problem with Eclipse and not easily fixed in SPIDER. Eclipse 3.6 seems to improve this for some platforms, like Mac OS X.
• NOTE: You may see the text There are no categorized items, when you try to download SPIDER. In this case uncheck the “Group items by category” checkbox in the Available software dialog.
The embedded documentation (manual, release notes) in SPIDER 0.15 are for SICStus Prolog 4.1.0, not for SICStus Prolog 4.1.1. SICStus 4.1.1 was just a bug-fix release so there are no interesting changes in the documentation between these versions. -->

• The parser used in SPIDER is ISO Prolog compliant but does not implement all SICStus extensions. In particular it does not allow an operator to be the argument of an operator. For instance, is/2 would give a syntax error, whereas (is)/2 would not.

  The SPIDER parser will probably never support all SICStus extensions.

• Termininals in the head of a Definite Clause Grammar rule are not supported.
• Not all directives are handled. Even for directives that are handled, like op/3, conjunctions of directives are not handled (Note that conjunctions of directives are not allowed by ISO Prolog).
• More issues

Language Editing

• Many Prolog-centric editor commands are missing, e.g. navigating in Prolog terms.
• The automatic indenter does not always do the right thing. E.g. after newline and at CTRL-I.
• There is no support for formatting an entire clause or the entire selection.
• More issues

Debugger

• No support for conditional breakpoints. Only plain spy points and line breakpoints are supported.
• The Variables view does not always show all or any variable bindings. This is much improved when using SICStus 4.2 and source info.
• More issues

Top-level

• The Top-level should have many of the Prolog-centric features of the Prolog editor, like completion and documentation info-pops.
• More issues

Other Issues

• If Eclipse complains Resource is out of sync with the file system or something similar then it is because files has changed in the file system unbeknownst to Eclipse. To fix this bring the Project Explorer view to the front, make sure no project is selected and then do Refresh from the File menu to update Eclipse's view of the world, and restart Eclipse.

  You can also change the Eclipse preferences so Eclipse refreshes once when started or automatically as needed.

• More issues

• Settings for the SICStus process.
  It should be possible to use SPIDER to change various prolog-flags, debugger settings, working directory etc.
• Quick Fixes.
  SPIDER should offer to solve problems it discovers. For instance, offer to add or modify a use_module/2 directive when a undefined predicate is detected.
• Refactorings.
  SPIDER should be able to automatically perform various modifications to the source code. For instance, rename a predicate or re-order the arguments of a predicate while updating all callers of the predicate accordingly.
• Inline Documentation Markup.
  SPIDER pop-ups documentation for user defined and SICStus-provided predicates and currently tries to render the documentation for SICStus built-ins and libraries in a sensible way. For this to work well we need a new way of documenting predicates that is more self-contained than the whole-file markup we currently use for the SICStus libraries.

  Instead we need something like Javadoc for documenting Prolog code. We are aware of many attempts in this direction but none that fulfills all our requirements.

  Also, we want to ensure that the same documentation markup can be used outside of SPIDER, e.g. to generate documentation files.

• CLP debugger/visualizer.
  Tools for debug and visualize Constraint Logic Programs (CLP) written with library(clpfd).