[m-dev.] Re: Calling an arbitrary predicate from mdb

[Fergus Henderson]

On 03-Dec-1998, Tyson Dowd <trd at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> On 03-Dec-1998, Peter Schachte <pets at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> > [Tyson:]
> > > [Bert:]
> > > > Ideally, you should be able to load and unload a Mercury-compiled
> > > > shared object from the debugger commandline also.
> > > 
> > > Yes, well, as discussed at the Mercury meeting today this is a big
> > > step for a rather small functionality gain.
> > 
> > I can't comment on how big a step it is, but I think the gain in
> > functionality is potentially very significant
>  
> I was referring to the benefits for being able to load and unload pretty
> printers for terms.  This is a pretty small benefit.

Agreed.

> The benefits of dynamic code loading for programming in general are large.

Yes.  A Mercury interface to dlopen(), dlsym(), etc. should be reasonably
straightforward, and could be very useful.

--
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "Binaries may die
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |   but source code lives forever"
PGP: finger fjh at 128.250.37.3        |     -- leaked Microsoft memo.