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Any DCG rule is really syntactic sugar for an ordinary Prolog rule. So it's not really too surprising that we're allowed to make use of extra arguments. Similarly, it shouldn't come as too much of a surprise that we can also add calls to any Prolog predicate whatsoever to the right hand side of a DCG rule.
The DCG of the previous section can, for example, be adapted to work with Prolog numbers instead of the successor representation of numbers by using calls to Prolog's built-in arithmetic functionality to add up how many as, bs, and cs have already been generated. Here is the code:
s --> ablock(Count),bblock(Count),cblock(Count).
ablock(0) --> [].
ablock(NewCount) --> [a],ablock(Count), {NewCount is Count + 1}.
bblock(0) --> [].
bblock(NewCount) --> [b],bblock(Count), {NewCount is Count + 1}.
cblock(0) --> [].
cblock(NewCount) --> [c],cblock(Count), {NewCount is Count + 1}. These extra goals can be written anywhere on the right side of a DCG rule, but must stand between curly brackets. When Prolog encounters such curly brackets while translating a DCG into its internal representation, it just takes the extra goals specified between the curly brackets over into the translation. So, the second rule for the non-terminal ablock above would be translated as follows:
ablock(NewCount,A,B) :-
'C'(A, a, C),
ablock(Count, C, B),
NewCount is Count + 1. This possibility of adding arbitrary Prolog goals to the right hand side of DCG rules, makes DCGs very very powerful (in fact, we can do anything that we can do in Prolog) and is not used much. There is, however, one interesting application for extra goals in computational linguistics; namely that with the help of extra goals, we can seperate the rules of a grammar from lexical information.
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