2.17.4 Indexing and portability

The base-line functionality of Prolog implementations provides indexing on constants and functor (name/arity) on the first argument. This must be your assumption if wide portability of your program is important. This can typically be achieved by exploiting term_hash/2 or term_hash/4 and/or maintaining multiple copies of a predicate with reordered arguments and wrappers that update all implementations (assert/retract) and selects the appropriate implementation (query).

YAP provides full JIT indexing, including indexing arguments of compound terms. YAP's indexing has been the inspiration for enhancing SWI-Prolog's indexing capabilities.