The Prolog Development System WWW Site

Ciao Beta Version 1.13.0 available!. The latest development version of Ciao.

Ciao Latest Automatically Released Version 1.13.0 available!. Each day, if changes has been introduced, a set of CiaoDE installers is automatically generated. Use at your own risk.

Copyright note: All this software is provided under the GNU GPL and/or LGPL licenses.

Support and mailing lists:

ciao-users@clip.dia.fi.upm.es: questions (in English) whose answer may be of general interest. Also updates, bug fixes, etc. You need to subscribe during the download process, or by sending an ascii message containing in the body the word subscribe alone in one line to ciao-users-request@clip.dia.fi.upm.es. We will keep your address strictly confidential. Archive available.
ciao@clip.dia.fi.upm.es: for more specific issues (reaches the Ciao developers only).
ciao-bug@clip.dia.fi.upm.es for reporting bugs.

Personalized professional support and maintenance services are available (please contact clip@dia.fi.upm.es for details).

Tutorials and presentations:

A brief (somewhat old) tutorial on Ciao features [pdf, pdf-2perpage, ps, ps-2perpage, html].
A brief tutorial on LPdoc [pdf, pdf-2perpage, ps, ps-2perpage, html ].
A brief tutorial on CiaoPP [pdf, pdf-2perpage, ps, ps-2perpage, html].

Other documentation: see the reference manuals for each component below. Also, Ciao, LPdoc, and CiaoPP incorporate many recent results in programming languages research. See our list of publications available on-line and their references.

Version note: Not all versions of the Ciao system components are guaranteed to work together. On the other hand the current versions in this page have typically been checked to be fully compatible. Thus, if you download one component and also use other components, we recommend downloading the newer version of those components too.

Available components of the Prolog development system:

ciao: The Ciao Prolog System

ciaopp: The Ciao Preprocessor
(Development snapshots often available in BETA. Contact webmaster@clip.dia.fi.upm.es for downloading.)

lpdoc: The lpdoc Documentation Generator

ciao: The Ciao Prolog System

Ciao is a public domain, next generation multi-paradigm programming environment with a unique set of features:

Ciao offers a complete Prolog system, supporting ISO-Prolog, but its novel modular design allows both restricting and extending the language. As a result, it allows working with fully declarative subsets of Prolog and also to extend these subsets (or ISO-Prolog) both syntactically and semantically. Most importantly, these restrictions and extensions can be activated separately on each program module so that several extensions can coexist in the same application for different modules.
Ciao also supports (through such extensions) programming with functions, higher-order (with predicate abstractions), constraints, and objects, as well as feature terms (records), persistence, several control rules (breadth-first search, iterative deepening, ...), concurrency (threads/engines), a good base for distributed execution (agents), and parallel execution. Libraries also support WWW programming, sockets, external interfaces (C, Java, TclTk, relational databases, etc.), etc.
Ciao offers support for programming in the large with a robust module/object system, module-based separate/incremental compilation (automatically --no need for makefiles), an assertion language for declaring (optional) program properties (including types and modes, but also determinacy, non-failure, cost, etc.), automatic static inference and static/dynamic checking of such assertions, etc.
Ciao also offers support for programming in the small producing small executables (including only those builtins used by the program) and support for writing scripts in Prolog.
The Ciao programming environment includes a classical top-level and a rich emacs interface with an embeddable source-level debugger and a number of execution visualization tools.
The Ciao compiler (which can be run outside the top level shell) generates several forms of architecture-independent and stand-alone executables, which run with speed, efficiency and executable size which are very competitive with other commercial and academic Prolog/CLP systems. Library modules can be compiled into compact bytecode or C source files, and linked statically, dynamically, or autoloaded.
The novel modular design of Ciao enables, in addition to modular program development, effective global program analysis and static debugging and optimization via source to source program transformation. These tasks are performed by the Ciao preprocessor (ciaopp, distributed separately).
The Ciao programming environment also includes lpdoc, an automatic documentation generator for LP/CLP programs. It processes Prolog files adorned with (Ciao) assertions and machine-readable comments and generates manuals in many formats including postscript, pdf, texinfo, info, HTML, man, etc. , as well as on-line help, ascii README files, entries for indices of manuals (info, WWW, ...), and maintains WWW distribution sites.

Ciao is distributed under the GNU Library General Public License (LGPL).

Current version (1.10#8 of 2007/1/28):

ciao-1.10p8.tar.gz: Tared, gzipped complete sources for compilation under several Un*x flavors (Linux, SunOS, Solaris, Mac OS X, IRIX, ...) and under GNU-Win32 for Windows 32 (Windows 98, NT, 2000, XP, ...). Please read the INSTALL file for installation instructions (as well as architecture-specific notes and suggestions for porting to currently unsupported platforms).

ciao Reference Manual - html

ciao Reference Manual - pdf

ciao Reference Manual - postscript

Latest distributed version for `ciao`:

This version is the latest available for ciao. It usually contains more features than the current version above, and some bug fixes. It is a snapshot of the development version, and some features may still be in an unstable state. Anyway, it should also have improvements over the current stable version.

Ciao Beta Version 1.13.0 available!. The latest development version of Ciao.
Ciao Latest Automatically Released Version 1.13.0 available!. Each day, if changes has been introduced, a set of CiaoDE installers is automatically generated. Use at your own risk.

List of all available versions for `ciao`:

Note: from 0.8 on, 'even' versions (e.g., 1.0, 1.4, ...) are stable distributions, whereas odd versions (e.g., 1.1, 1.5, ...) are versions under testing. These 'odd'-numbered versions typically are meant for people collaborating in Ciao development or people who would like to try out new functionality and help us with testing of upcoming versions.

ciaopp: The CIAO Prolog Preprocessor

ciaopp is the precompiler of the CIAO Prolog development environment. ciaopp can perform a number of program debugging, analysis and source-to-source transformation tasks on (CIAO) Prolog programs. These tasks include:

Inference of properties of the predicates and literals of the progam, including types, modes and other variable instantiation properties, non-failure, determinacy, bounds on computational cost, bounds on sizes of terms in the program, etc.
Certain kinds of static debugging, finding errors before running the program. This includes checking the ways in which programs call the system library predicates and also checking the assertions present in the program or in other modules used by the program. Such assertions essentially represent partial specifications of the program.
Several kinds of source to source program transformations such as program specialization, program parallelization (including granularity control), inclusion of run-time tests for assertions which cannot be checked completely at compile-time, etc.

The information generated by analysis, the assertions in the system libraries, and the assertions optionally included in user programs as specifications are all written in the same assertion language, which is in turn also used by the CIAO system documentation generator, lpdoc.

ciaopp is distributed under the GNU general public license.

(In Beta test. Please contact webmaster@clip.dia.fi.upm.es for downloading instructions.)

lpdoc: The lpdoc Documentation Generator

lpdoc is an automatic program documentation generator for (C)LP systems.

lpdoc generates a reference manual automatically from one or more source files for a logic program (including ISO-Prolog, Ciao, many CLP systems, ...). It is particularly useful for documenting library modules, for which it automatically generates a description of the module interface. However, lpdoc can also be used quite successfully to document full applications and to generate nicely formatted plain ascii ``readme'' files. A fundamental advantage of using lpdoc to document programs is that it is much easier to maintain a true correspondence between the program and its documentation, and to identify precisely to what version of the program a given printed manual corresponds.

The quality of the documentation generated can be greatly enhanced by including within the program text:

assertions (types, modes, etc. ...) for the predicates in the program, and
machine-readable comments (in the ``literate programming'' style).

The assertions and comments included in the source file need to be written using the Ciao system assertion language. A simple compatibility library is available to make traditional (constraint) logic programming systems ignore these assertions and comments allowing normal treatment of programs documented in this way.

The documentation is currently generated first in texinfo format. From the texinfo output, printed and on-line manuals in several formats (dvi, ps, info, html, etc.) can be easily generated automatically, using publicly available tools. lpdoc can also generate 'man' pages (Unix man page format) as well as brief descriptions in html or emacs info formats suitable for inclusion in an on-line index of applications. In particular, lpdoc can create and maintain fully automatically WWW and info sites containing on-line versions of the documents it produces.

The lpdoc manual (and the Ciao system manuals) are generated by lpdoc.

lpdoc is distributed under the GNU general public license.

Note: lpdoc is currently fully supported only on Linux and other Un*x-like systems, due to the use of Makefiles and other Un*x-related utilities. It is possible to run lpdoc under Win32 using Cygwin. A version which is written entirely in Prolog and will thus run standalone also on Win32 is currently under beta testing.