[m-dev.] mercury home page

[Tyson Richard DOWD]

> 
> Tyson Richard DOWD, you wrote:
> > 
> > > I don't like the phrase "numerous optimization/time trade-offs" in the
> > > second paragraph of the Mercury home page.  However, I can't think of
> > > a good replacement.  Any suggestions?
> > 
> > The old sentence was:
> > 
> > 	Mercury addresses the problems of large-scale program
> > 	development, allowing modularity, separate compilation, and
> > 	numerous optimization/time trade-offs.
> > 
> > How about:
> > 
> > 	Mercury addresses the problems of large-scale program
> >         development, allowing modularity, separate compilation, and
> > 	control over compile-time/run-time trade-offs.
> 
> This sentence is better.  Now I understand what you are trying to say.
> However, in fact we actually don't have a very good range of trade-offs,
> because compile time ranges from slow to very slow, rather than from fast
> to very slow. 

Compile time isn't too bad on a decent machine, but you're right, we
could do to have a super-fast mode. Perhaps bytecode generation will
fill this gap somewhat (for starters, no gcc involved).

>                Also, this is a feature of the Mercury compiler, rather than
> of the language.
> 
> Um, I still can't think of a good replacement ;-)

Perhaps move this into a section talking about the compiler, that
mentions optimiation options (-O0 to -O6), automatic dependency
generation, and other funky thing the implementation does. We can
replace that point by something about abstract data types, which fits
into the theme of large-scale development nicely, and I don't think is
mentioned on the front page anywhere.

-- 
       Tyson Dowd           #
                            #             Sign on refridgerator:
     trd at cs.mu.oz.au        #           Refrigerate after opening. 
http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~trd #                  - C. J. Owen.