Summary of Mercury Meeting 14/07/98

[Tyson Dowd]

Here's a quick summary of some of what was discussed at last weeks
Mercury meeting.

DJ 	- discussed existential types in Mercury, 
	- they allow a polymorphic predicate to bind its type parameter 
	- typeinfos can be outputs instead of just inputs
	- how they work together nicely with typeclasses
	- how they interact with implied modes.

Zoltan 	- gathered feedback on the help system in the debugger
	- cunningly settled an argument with Fergus about the meaning
	  of the argument of the "retry" command.

Fergus 	- Talked about his contact with the egcs people who are looking
	  at using some high level language with backtracking for
	  implementing the C++ parser.
	- Issues that would need to be resolved before Mercury would
	  be suitable include:
	  	- need field names/records.
		- better interface with C data-types
		- reduce memory footprint/accurate GC
		- efficient parsing (destructive update or folding?)

Mark also discussed some details of his work on proof-tree / declarative
deugging stuff but I didn't take any notes about this (doh!).

-- 
       Tyson Dowd           # There isn't any reason why Linux can't be
                            # implemented as an enterprise computing solution.
     trd at cs.mu.oz.au        # Find out what you've been missing while you've
http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~trd # been rebooting Windows NT. -- InfoWorld, 1998.