Invoking XSB
Under Unix, XSB can be invoked by the command:
$XSB_DIR/bin/xsb
if you have installed XSB in your private directory. If XSB is installed in a shared directory (e.g.,
$SHARED_XSB for the entire site (UNIX only), then you should use
$SHARED_XSB/bin/xsb
In both cases, you will find yourself in the top level interpreter. As mentioned above, this script
automatically detects the system configuration you are running on and will use the right files and
executables. (Of course, XSB should have been built for that architecture earlier.)
Under Windows, you should invoke XSB by typing:
$XSB_DIRinxsb
This script tries to find the XSB executable and invoke it. If, for some reason, it fails to do so, the
user should call the executable directly.
$XSB_DIRconfigx86-pc-windowsinxsb.exe
You may want to make an alias such as xsb to the above commands, for convenience, or you
might want to put the directory where the XSB command is found in the $PATH environment
variable. However, you should not make hard links to this script or to the XSB executable. If you
invoke XSB via such a hard link, XSB will likely be confused and will not find its libraries. That
said, you can create other scripts and call the above script from there.
ISO“standard” Prolog predicates are supported by XSB, in addition to many other predicates:
so those of you who consider yourselves champion entomologists, can try to test them for bugs now.
Details are in Chapter 6.