[m-dev.] op/3, again.

[Peter Schachte]

On Tue, Mar 14, 2006 at 10:24:39AM +1100, Ralph Becket wrote:
> While the people you list may be
> competent Mercury programmers, we have also had much experience with
> people who are not, and it is the code they will write that causes us
> much concern.

This was never a very good argument, Ralph.  Of course incompetent
programmers write bad code:  that's practically the definition of
"incompetent programmer."  Mercury has plenty of *much* sharper edges
than op declarations with which newbies can injure themselves and
others.  The people who might come to grief on op declarations are
unlikely to survive long enough to do so.  On the other hand, op
declarations may allow some to write in mini-langauges built on
Mercury without ever having to understand full-blown Mercury.  I
imagine this is what Doug's client is doing.  It's unlikely a very
natural-looking mini-language could be built using just the built-in
Mercury operators.

-- 
Peter Schachte              Life is what happens to you when you're making
schachte at cs.mu.OZ.AU        other plans.
www.cs.mu.oz.au/~schachte/      -- Betty Talmadge 
Phone: +61 3 8344 1338      
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