ClauseCollection
A general-purpose, immutable container of Clauses, matched by unification rather than by equality: this is the low-level storage abstraction that a it.unibo.tuprolog.theory.Theory builds its Prolog-flavoured API (assertA/assertZ/retract) on top of. Every mutating operation (add, addAll, retrieve, retrieveAll) returns a new collection, leaving this untouched — see MutableClauseCollection for the in-place counterpart.
The default implementations returned by this interface's factory methods (and by ClauseQueue/ ClauseMultiSet) are backed by a RETE-style discrimination tree (see it.unibo.tuprolog.collections.rete.custom.ReteTree) indexed by directive-vs-rule, functor, arity and first-argument shape, so get/retrieve-like lookups only re-check clauses that could plausibly unify with the query, rather than scanning the whole collection.
See also
Inheritors
Properties
Only the clauses in this collection that are Directives.
Computes the size of the ClauseCollection
The Unificator used to match clauses against each other in this collection.
Functions
Gives a freshly produced ClauseCollection including the given Clause and the content of this one
Gives a freshly produced ClauseCollection including all the given Clause and the content of this one
Tells if, for each of the given elements, the ClauseCollection contains a unifying clause
Tells if the ClauseCollection contains any Clause
Tells if the ClauseCollection contains at least one Clause; the negation of isEmpty.
Iterates over all the clauses in this collection, in an order that depends on the concrete implementation (e.g. insertion order for a ClauseQueue, unspecified for a ClauseMultiSet).
Produces a RetrieveResult as a consequence of the attempt at deleting the given Clause from this ClauseCollection
Produces a RetrieveResult as a consequence of the attempt at deleting all the given Clause from this ClauseCollection