[m-dev.] Drop SICStus & NU-Prolog support?

[Fergus Henderson]

On 23-Nov-1998, Thomas Charles Conway <conway at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> On Sat, Nov 21, 1998 at 06:30:45AM EST, Fergus Henderson wrote:
> > Since we now have a working Mercury debugger, there seems to be
> > little point in compiling Mercury programs using a Prolog system.
> > Therefore I propose that we drop the existing support for SICStus
> > and NU-Prolog.
> > 
> > Comments?
> 
> This seems like a generally good idea.

OK, it looks like we have general agreement there.

> What is the status of generating Prolog code?

Note that generating Prolog is a bit of a different issue than
just trying to run unmodified Mercury code directly.
Generating Prolog might be quite useful (for example,
to speed up the edit-compile-debug cycle).

>From the WORK_IN_PROGRESS file:

 | Work not in progress
 | --------------------
 | 
 | The compiler also contains some code for the following features,
 | but work on them has stopped, since finishing them off would be
 | quite a bit more work, and our current priorities lie elsewhere.
 | Still, these would make interesting and worthwhile projects
 | if someone has the time for it.
...
 | * There is a `--generate-prolog' option for a new back-end
 |   that generates Prolog code.
 |   Not very much progress has really been made on this.

A quick grep through the source code shows that the `--generate-prolog'
option currently has no effect at all.

Basically the only progress that has been made is compiler/dnf.m.

-- 
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.