Designing a Development Environment for Logic and Multi-Paradigm Programming

The Eclipse platform has been extended to provide integrated development environments for many different languages and systems. Declarative programming, however, and in particular logic languages, has still to benefit from the state-of-the-art Eclipse infrastructure supporting a huge number of development activities. We set out to design an environment for logic programming built around tuProlog, a Java-based light-weight Prolog engine that provides seamless integration into the platform and promotes an innovative form of interaction with the interpreter, allowing a multiplicity of independently configurable instances to be exploited within the same project. Moreover, we use the Java/Prolog multi-paradigm capabilities of tuProlog as a case study for discussing the integration of two different programming languages in a single environment. Finally, we compare our environment to some related projects in the logic programming context.