[m-dev.] An optimization worth doing.

[Fergus Henderson]

Lee Naish, you wrote:
> 
> As for whether its a Mercury defficiency or a Mercury implementation
> defficiency, Fergus might be right but I suspect some changes to the
> Mercury type system would be needed to get the additional
> expressiveness.

That may be right; or it certainly may be _easier_ if there are some
additional changes to give the compiler appropriate hints about
when to "inline" data structures.

Note that if you're making heavy use of partially instantiated
data structures, then data structure inlining may increase space
usage rather than decreasing it.  That's why compiler hints might
be helpful.

Incidentally, Turbo Prolog has something along these lines.

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au>   |  "I have always known that the pursuit
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>   |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
PGP: finger fjh at 128.250.37.3         |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.