The purpose of this module is to provide a single official predicate for serializing Prolog terms that the Attempto tools produce (DRSs, token lists, OWL FSS, etc.).

Serialized terms can be stored in files, sent over HTTP, etc., so that they can be later read back into the exact same term.

Essentially we provide a customized version of Prolog built-ins like write_canonical/[1,2] and writeq/[1,2].

author

- Kaarel Kaljurand

version

- 2009-03-20

TODO:

• test how \= (ACE non-equality) is serialized, maybe check character_escapes(bool, changeable)
• find a way to print terms which contain variables so that the output has nice variable names (A vs _G123) but without the detour of numbervars, maybe check: print, portray
• should we serialize singletons as '_'
• we make an extra effort to locally undefine some operators, there must be a cleaner way

 serialize_term(+Stream:stream, +Term:term) is det

 serialize_term(+Term:term) is det

Arguments:

Stream	- is the output stream
Term	- is a term to be serialized

 serialize_term_into_atom(+Term:term, -SerializedTerm:atom) is det

Arguments:

Term	- is a term to be serialized
SerializedTerm	- is the term serialized as an atom

Undocumented predicates

The following predicates are exported, but not or incorrectly documented.

 serialize_term(Arg1)