[m-dev.] mdemangle

[Fergus Henderson]

Thomas Charles CONWAY, you wrote:
> 
> I have on my plate at the moment to fix a bug in mdemangle.

What you have on your plate is actually to _investige a test case failure_
for mdemangle.  As it happens, I had another glance at the failed test case
output tonight, and realized that the cause of the problem was not related
to your change to demangle lambda goals differently, in fact it was just
that I had forgotten to update the test case input after changing the
name mangling to insert an extra `_' so that Windows DLLs can work.
Sorry about that.

> Mdemangle
> represents a double maintanence problem, in as much as the profiler
> also does demangling of names. Why not write mdemangle in Mercury,
> and share the code?

As the comment at the top of mdemangle says,
"this is implemented in C to minimize startup time and memory usage".

Since mdemangle gets invoked every time you link, i.e. every time
you make a change and run `mmake', performance is important.
It may be worth putting up with the double maintenance problem, if we
saving 0.5s every link.

--
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.