[m-dev.] for review: add nancy and wims papers

[Fergus Henderson]

On 21-Feb-2000, Peter Ross <petdr at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> +<strong>
> +Towards memory reuse for Mercury
> +</strong>
> +<br>
> +Nancy Mazur, Gerda Janssens and Maurice Bruynooghe
> +<br>
> +<em>
> +Proceedings of the International Workshop on Implementation of
> +Declarative Languages
> +</em>,
> +Paris, France, October 1999
> +<a href="papers/liveness.ps.gz">Available here (61K)</a>.
> +<p>
> +While Mercury allows destructive input/unique output modes which direct
> +the compiler to reuse memory, use of these modes is very cumbersome for
> +the programmer. Moreover it does not fit the declarative programming
> +paradigm where the programmer doesn't have to worry about the details of
> +memory management.

With all due respect, I don't agree with some of the wording there.
I don't agree that the use of unique modes is [always] "very cumbersome".
Nancy, Gerda, and Maurice can of course write what they like
in their papers, but I don't think we should endorse these statements
on the Mercury web site, lest they be taken as the "official Mercury
line" on unique modes.

I would prefer it if "is very cumbersome" was changed to "can be cumbersome".

I also think it would be better to avoid implying that "the declarative
programming paradigm" means that programmers don't have to worry
about the details of memory management, because that it turn might
imply that since Mercury is a "declarative" language, Mercury
programmers never need to worry about memory management.
So I would prefer it if the last sentence above was changed to
"In most situations, it would be nicer if the programmer didn't have
to worry about the details of memory management."

-- 
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.
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