[m-dev.] multi-language definitions

[Tyson Dowd]

On 25-Feb-2002, Holger Krug <hkrug at rationalizer.com> wrote:
> Step 2 is the most time-consuming step and needs no active knowledge
> of Mercury, because the people doing this wouldn't see any mercury
> code. A great part of the work could be done by programmers having
> good experience in the target language.

I disagree that just because they are editing a file called "foo.java"
instead of "foo.m" -- and therefore not seeing any Mercury code, that
this means they don't need *any* active knowledge of Mercury.

In general they may be manipulating Mercury data structures, writing
semidet code, passing and returning TypeInfos, etc.  They are going to
have to be able to read the Mercury type signature and mode information
to be able to understand the calling convention and argument types, not
to mention reading the documentation to understand what the code does.

For simple predicates this will be mostly trivial, but it is much harder
with multi-moded predicates, and predicates which manipulate complex
Mercury data structures.

But it certainly may lower the cost of implementation.

-- 
       Tyson Dowd           # 
                            #  Surreal humour isn't everyone's cup of fur.
     trd at cs.mu.oz.au        # 
http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~trd #
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