I'm not being picky. I have a lot that I need to learn
about how students think.
On Jul 1, 2009, at 4:22 AM, Günter Kniesel wrote:
> In particular, some students who saw assert/1 but also saw clause/2
> simply
> deduced that it would have been a consistent design to have an
> assert/2 and
But how would it be consistent? There isn't any
clause/1! This is like saying "I see a bathtub with two
taps and one plughole, so I expect to find a second plughole
if I look hard enough."
Since
?- help(clause).
?- help(assert).
would have told them instantly what versions of clause/N
and assert/N were available, this should have been cleared
up pretty quickly.
These students who go and try things, do they try SWI's
very nice on-line documentation as part of their exploration?
If not, what could be done to make it more attractive to them?
By the way, I use R a lot. And the on-line help in R
is done by typing, for example,
?lm
to get help about the lm function. So I find myself
typing things like
?open
at Prolog a lot. That doesn't work because there's a missing
full stop, but I can fix that on the next line. Or I could
if ? were suitably defined. So my ~/.plrc contains these
two lines:
:- op(999, fy, ?).
?(Topic) :- help(Topic).
after which
?clause.
?assert.
work.
If you don't use R (or S) much, this may not do anything
for you, but it has saved me a lot of frustration.
>
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