[m-rev.] for review: atoms in the debugger

[David Overton]

On Fri, Jan 04, 2002 at 04:21:20PM +1100, Zoltan Somogyi wrote:
> On 04-Jan-2002, Ralph Becket <rafe at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> > For me the problem arises from too many years of using Prolog's
> > unfortunately misnamed atom/1 and atomic/1 meta-predicates.
> 
> Ouch. I have successfully managed to forget those.

Also note the following use of "atom" in the Mercury standard library:


	:- type term(T)		--->	term__functor(
						const,
						list(term(T)),
						term__context
					)
				;	term__variable(var(T)).
	:- type const		--->	term__atom(string)
				;	term__integer(int)
				;	term__string(string)
				;	term__float(float).

I have often found these two different uses of "atom" confusing.

Looking at the Sicstus manual, they seem to use "goal" to refer to the
atom printed by the debugger:

	
	S 23  6  Call: T foo(hello,there,_123) ?

	S is a spy-point indicator.  It is printed as `+', indicating that
	there is a spy-point on `foo/3', or ` ', denoting no spy-point.

	....

	The next word specifies the particular port (Call, Exit,
	Redo, Fail, or Exception).

	The goal is then printed so that you can inspect its current
	instantiation state.  This is done using `print/1' (*note Term
	IO::.) so that all goals output by the tracing mechanism can be
	pretty printed if the user desires.


David
-- 
David Overton      Department of Computer Science & Software Engineering
PhD Student        The University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia
+61 3 8344 9159    http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~dmo
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