XPCE is distributed as a library on top of the hosting Prolog system. For use with SWI-Prolog, this library is auto-loaded as soon as one of its predicates (such as new/2) is accessed or it can be loaded explicitly using
:- use_module(library(pce)).
In Unix XPCE/SWI-Prolog distribution the program xpce is a symbolic link to pl and causes the system to pull in and announce the XPCE library with the banner:
% xpce XPCE 6.0.0, February 2002 for i686-gnu-linux-gnu and X11R6 Copyright (C) 1993-2002 University of Amsterdam. XPCE comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY. This is free software, and you are welcome to redistribute it under certain conditions. The host-language is SWI-Prolog version 5.0.0 For HELP on prolog, please type help. or apropos(topic). on xpce, please type manpce. 1 ?-
SWI-Prolog's prompt is ``<n> ?-'' where <n> is the history-number of the command. The banner indicates the XPCE version. The indicated version is 5.1 and the patch-level is 0.
On MS-Windows, Prolog programs are normally loaded and started by
double-clicking a ..pl
file. XPCE,
being a normal library, does not change this. Note that XPCE
can only be used fully with the GUI-based plwin.exe. Using the
the console-based plcon.exe program only the non-GUI
functionality of XPCE is accessible.