[m-dev.] Summer Project

[Richard Fothergill]

Attached you will find a brief report on my activities so far this summer.

-Richard
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Hi everyone,

On Ralph's request, I have something of a summary of my summer project for you:

The project is to produce a propagation based constraint solver solution to
mode analysis of Mercury programs. Last year I finished a simple constraint
generator; this year I will (hopefully) complete enough to have the constraint
solving approach ordering conjunctions in general Mercury programs.

Progress so far: at this point the new constraint based mode system will
build constraints describing which goals produce and consume program
variables, solve those constraints, and order conjunctions, for a limited
Mercury syntax.

There is a large amount of fleshing out to be done, including:
	fixing a bug in constraint variable generation for if-then-elses;
	mode inference (most of the framework is there already);
	mode error reporting (almost non-existant at this stage);
	extending to cover a fuller Mercury syntax (specifically HO code);
&	elaboration of constraints - at the moment they don't handle
	 subtyping, though when they do they will in fully ready
	 to handle partial instantiation as well, so this will be a
	 major change, and a large job.

After that, there are plenty of tasks to work with, eg uniqueness.

I'll post the modules I've been working on to reviews shortly.

-Richard