The Structs Package

• str-fty: Foreign Types
• str-usq: Using Structs with QPC
• str-cft: Checking Foreign Term Types
• str-cdf: Creating and Destroying Foreign Terms
• str-afd: Accessing and Modifying Foreign Term Contents
• str-cas: Casting
• str-nul: Null Foreign Terms
• str-ifc: Interfacing with Foreign Code
• str-etr: Examining Type Definitions at Runtime
• str-s2c: Structs to C
• str-tip: Tips

The structs package allows Prolog to hold pointers to C data structures, and to access and store into fields in those data structures. Currently, the only representation for a pointer supported by Quintus Prolog is an integer, so it isn't possible to guarantee that Prolog can't confuse a pointer with an ordinary Prolog term. What this package does is to represent such a pointer as a term with the type of the structure or array as its functor and the integer that is the address of the actual data as its only argument. We will refer such terms as foreign terms.

Important caveats:

You should not count on future versions of the struct package to continue to represent foreign terms as compound Prolog terms. In particular, you should never explicitly take apart a foreign term using unification or functor/3 and arg/3. You may use the predicate foreign_type/2 to find the type of a foreign term, and cast/3 (casting a foreign term to address) to get the address part of a foreign term. You may also use cast/3 to cast an address back to a foreign term. You should use null_foreign_term/2 to check if a foreign term is null, or to create a null foreign term of some type.

It should never be necessary to explicitly take apart foreign terms.