[m-dev.] for review: Mercury Coding Challenge

[Fergus Henderson]

On 12-Jan-1999, Peter Ross <petdr at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> To celebrate the release of Mercury 0.8, the Mercury team is pleased to
> announce a Mercury Coding Challenge.

Here's some comments:

- "io:state" should be "io__state".  Please don't encourage people
  to use `:' as module separator as this is likely to change in some
  future version of Mercury.

- in project.tex, "ai" should be "AI".

- in project.tex, the "\\1"s in the text below are typos, I think:
	> You should write a predicate {\tt human\\1} which returns an initial
	> human player, just as {\tt silly\\1} returns an initial silly player.

- There are currently some bugs in the Mercury compiler's handling
  of exported instance declarations.  The instance declaration in silly.m
  probably shouldn't be allowed, since the it refers to entites which are
  not declared in the module interface.  Eventually, you ought to be
  able to write just an abstract instance declaration in the interface

  	:- instance player(silly).

  with the instance definition occurring in the implementation section,
  but currently we don't support abstract instance declarations.
  Given that we don't support abstract instance declarations, I suppose
  the fact that we don't report an error for instance declarations
  like the one in silly.m could I suppose be considered a feature ;-)

  I also just discovered there are some bugs in the current compiler that
  mean that intermodule optimization won't work for any module which imports
  silly.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.