[m-dev.] Thinking about a "Mercury Report" type document.

[Fergus Henderson]

On 08-Nov-2001, Ralph Becket <rafe at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> I've been thinking about the feasibility of putting together a
> document (say 10-20 pages) describing in resonably formal terms
> everything you need to know to put a working Mercury compiler
> together -

Could you be more specific about how this would differ from the Mercury
language reference manual?

The language reference manual is a fair bit bigger than 10-20 pages,
of course ;-)

> the document would not address issues of optimization,
> code generation or (probably) syntactic sugar.

The language reference manual doesn't address issues of
optimization or code generation.  The syntax chapter is
only 16 pages.  Even if you strip out the syntax chapter,
the foreign language interface, impurity, pragmas,
and all the stuff about implementation-dependent extensions,
there's still more than 40 pages remaining.

> The document would need at least the following:
> 
> A definition of the "core" mercury syntax (omitting sugar,
> name munging, foreign language interface etc.)
> 
> A definition of the type system (it would be nice to include
> type classes, but v1.0 of the document could probably omit them.)
> 
> A formal description of type inference for Mercury.

Well, that's enough for at least one paper, if not more -- indeed it
is probably enough for a PhD thesis (David Jeffery's), although I guess
we'll have to wait for the examiner's reports to be sure! ;-)

> A definition of the inst and mode systems.
> 
> A formal description of mode inference for Mercury.

That's probably at least as big a job as the formal
description of the type system.

> An operational semantics for SHNF.

That one is about the right amount for a paper.  I did a bit of work
on this with Andy Moran, working on defining a "small-step" formal
operational semantics, but unfortunately other things intervened
and the details got paged out of my cerebral cache...

I certainly think it would be a good idea to have more formal descriptions
of all of these things.  But let's pick them off one at a time.

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
The University of Melbourne         |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.
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