[m-dev.] questions about grades

[Paul Bone]

On Tue, Feb 23, 2016 at 12:20:05PM +1100, Peter Wang wrote:
> On Tue, 23 Feb 2016 11:10:29 +1100 (AEDT), "Zoltan Somogyi" <zoltan.somogyi at runbox.com> wrote:
> > 
> > What exactly do new mercuryfile structs do? The log message of the initial
> > commit is not that informative, and anyway, I expect that the capabilities
> > it enables would have changed, since the initial commit was in 2000.
> > Given that long history, why isn't it the default way to handle files,
> > or even the only way? Does anyone ever use it? If not, do we want to keep
> > supporting it?
> 
> It is a vtable that allows the user to override the C functions called
> by the predicates in the io module, rather than always using the C stdio
> functions.
> 
> I don't know if MC use it still.  extras/logged_output/logged_output.m
> uses it.

I think it's fine if this goes away.  As of 2015 MC havn't been doing any
new projects in C (where MercuryFile is relevent), and if they recompile an
old project with a new Mercury this is just one of the many things that may
have changed.  I think the cost of maintaining it is higher than the risk of
it breaking something and the cost of that breakage.


-- 
Paul Bone