How to run programs

A program consists of a set of predicates. A predicate is made up of a (not necessarily consecutive) sequence of clauses whose heads have the same predicate symbol and the same arity. Each predicate is defined in one module that is stored in a file, unless it is declared to be dynamic.

The name of a source file or a binary file is an atom. For example, a1, 'A1', and '124' are correct file names. A file name can start with an environment variable $V or %V%, which will be replaced by its value before the file is actually opened. The file name separator '/' should be used. Since '\' is used as the escape character in quoted strings and atoms, two consecutive backslashes constitute a separator, as in 'c:\\work\\myfile.pl'.