[m-dev.] fix for bytecode generator

[Fergus Henderson]

Bert Thompson, you wrote:
> 
> [Simone wrote:] 
> |so I don't think the change
> |would actually save much.
> 
> You're right. It doesn't save much at all. 
[...]
> Miniscule though the saving may be, [...]

The savings would not be miniscule, they would be negative.

If you want characters to be less of a special case than they are now,
then the right way to do it would be to make character literals
quantified (i.e. mercury_builtin:'a', mercury_builtin:'b', ...,
or perhaps char:'a', char:'b', ...).  However, doing this would
require some special-case coding (catch 22), and they would still have
to treated as a special case in exactly the same places that they're
already treated specially.  So I don't think this would be worthwhile.

-- 
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"
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