retract/1

Availability:built-in

[ISO,nondet]retract(+Term)

When Term is an atom or a term it is unified with the first unifying fact or clause in the database. The fact or clause is removed from the database. The retract/1 predicate respects the logical update view. This implies that retract/1 succeeds for all clauses that match Term when the predicate was called. The example below illustrates that the first call to retract/1 succeeds on bee on backtracking despite the fact that bee is already retracted.^{87Example by
Jan Burse}

:- dynamic insect/1.
insect(ant).
insect(bee).

?- (   retract(insect(I)),
       writeln(I),
       retract(insect(bee)),
       fail
   ;   true
   ).
ant ;
bee.

If multiple threads start a retract on the same predicate at the same time their notion of the entry generation is adjusted such that they do not retract the same first clause. This implies that, if multiple threads use once(retract(Term)), no two threads will retract the same clause. Note that on backtracking over retract/1, multiple threads may retract the same clause as both threads respect the logical update view.