10.15.2.4 Names of Terms

FDBG provides a service to assign names to Prolog terms for later reference. A name is an atom and it is usually associated with a compound term containing constraint variables, or with a single variable. In the former case, each variable appearing in the compound term is also assigned a name automatically by FDBG. This auto-assigned name is derived from the name of the term; see FDBG Name Auto-Generation.

Perhaps the most useful utilization of names is annotation, another service of FDBG. Here, each variable appearing in a Prolog term is replaced with a compound term describing it (i.e. containing its name, the variable itself, and some data regarding its domain). During annotation, unnamed constraint variables are also given a unique “anonymous” name automatically, these names begin with a ‘fdvar’ prefix. See FDBG Writing Visualizers.

The names will be used by the built-in visualizers when referring to constraint variables, and they can also be used to retrieve the terms assigned to them in user defined visualizers. See FDBG Visualizers.