SICStus Prolog offers the user an interactive programming environment with tools for incrementally building programs, debugging programs by following their executions, and modifying parts of programs without having to start again from scratch.
The text of a Prolog program is normally created in a file or a number of files using one of the standard text editors. The Prolog interpreter can then be instructed to read in programs from these files; this is called consulting the file. Alternatively, the Prolog compiler can be used for compiling the file.