This adds support for declaring predicates as placeholders through the
“#external” directive in the input language of clingo.
Placeholders are not subject to completion. This prevents predicates
that represent instance-specific facts from being assumed as universally
false by default negation when translating an encoding.
This stretches clingo’s usual syntax a bit to make the implementation
lightweight. In order to declare a predicate with a specific arity as a
placeholder, the following statement needs to be added to the program:
#external <predicate name>(<arity>).
Multiple unit tests cover cases where placeholders are used or not as
well as a more complex graph coloring example.
With C++17, optionals, an experimental language feature, were moved to
the “std” namespace. This makes C++17 mandatory and drops the now
obsolete “experimental” namespace.
Patrick Lühne