Hi,

I asked a question a while ago about writing a date parser, which has to
take
an atom representing the date and time as a single string and return it in a
standard format.

An example is 10:42:32 PM July 10 2001 which would be represented as:
datetime(10,7,2001,22,42,32)

I'm still having problems with the tokeniser section. This is what I have so
far:

go(DateTimeString, L) :-
     name(DateTimeString, L),    %Get the input string and use name/2 to
turn into ascii codes
     space(L).                             %pass the ascii code list to
getrest

                                                %getrest picks off the head.
Pass it to space to see if it is a ' '.

 space([46 | Rest]) :- !.             %If the character is a space (46) then
go to next char.

space(X | Rest) :-
     append(X, [], Date),             %If the char is not a space then store
it in a new list.
     store = Date,                        %store the char in a variable
called store
     space(Rest).                         %call space again

My method has been to use recursion to pick the head off the list, check if
it is a
delimiter character (',' or ';' or ',' or ' ') then put the ascii codes into
lists
for each token inside a larger list.

Sorry if this seems whole thing seems like a silly question, but I've only
just started using Prolog. Once I've picked off a head and determined that
it isn't a space, I store it in a list called Date using append. i then want
to call space again recursively so that the list gets filled up.
The problem I have that I dont want to keep the delimiters - how do I skip
them and get the next load of ascii codes into another list? And how do I
keep each list so that I can put them all into one larger list at the end?
I've tried declaring variables to store each list, but I keep getting the
error about singletons.

Thanks in advance,

Mike

Your description of what you intend to do is a correct solution, but is
not what the code you include does. I think perhaps you are still
thinking in procedural terms.

I can see no calls to getrest in your code, presumably when you say
getrest you mean space/1.

How exactly is this going to the next char? What you have written just
succeeds and does nothing else.

Since you have the equivalent correct in the first clause I presume this
is a typo and you mean space([X | Rest])

Firstly, variables in prolog begin with capitals or an underscore: store
is an atom, this will just fail unless it is a typo. Secondly, Date *is*
a variable that happens to be unified with a list conatining the single
element X; why exactly are you trying to store this in a new variable?
This looks to me as if you are still thinking in terms of procedural
language destructive assignment. Remember, in prolog there are no global
variables, and there is no destructive assignment, just unification. To
return something from a predicate you must it unify with a variable in
the head of the predicate.

How is this same list being filled up? You currently append to a new
list in each call.

Your first clause of space/1 does skip something, or at least it ignores
something. It just needs to go on to get the rest of the ascii codes.

The warning about singletons just means that there is a variable in a
predicate that appears only once - I imagine that in this case it is the
Rest in the first clause of space/1. Normally a singleton means you are
not doing what you intended, although sometimes you may not care about
all the arguments of a predicate, and this singleton is intentional. In
the latter case you can avoid the annoying warning by prepending an
underscore to the variable name.

--
Andrew Eremin
IC Parc, William Penney Lab.,        Tel: +44 (0)20 7594 8299
Imperial College                     Fax: +44 (0)20 7594 8432