More sophisticated syntax highlighting of Prolog code

Question

I'm wondering, does listings allow you to define your own syntax highlighting, and if so, how sophisticated is its system?

Here's a minimal example:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{listings}

\lstset{emph={%  
   {:-}%
     },emphstyle={\color{red}\bfseries\underbar}%
}%

\begin{document}
\begin{lstlisting}[language=Prolog]
    foo(Arg1, Arg2) :-
      bar(Arg3),
      baz(Arg4),
      length([1,2,3], 3).
\end{lstlisting}
\end{document}

Ideally, in the following code sample, "foo" would be highlighted (since it's declaring a new clause), as would ":-".

I tried to use emph and morekeywords to highlight :-, but neither worked. They seems to work for regular words like "for" and "while", but not for the sequence ":-". Is there a special way to escape this to add a keyword?

To highlight the name of the predicate before :-, I have no idea how I would tackle that. It's not essential, but it would be nice if I could get it working. Can I define custom syntax/grammar for highlighting Prolog?

Answer 1

Not quite a direct answer to your question, but I recommend the rather wonderful package minted. It uses pygments to highlight a wide variety of languages. Keep in mind that you'll need to pass -shell-escape to latex so that it can call out to pygments. Documentation here (pdf).

Frankly, I switched to minted because setting up anything complex in listings quickly got out of hand for my tastes.