[m-rev.] For review: Convert Mercury terms to XML

[Julien Fischer]

On Mon, 6 Dec 2004, Ian MacLarty wrote:

> On 6 Dec 2004, at 11:32, Ralph Becket wrote:
>
> > Julien Fischer, Sunday,  5 December 2004:
> >>
> >> I'm not really keen on the name `to_xml'.  How about either
> >> `xml' or `xml_util'?
> >
> term_to_xml is okay.  I want the name to reflect that it's not an XML
> parser, so xml or xml_util aren't good.  I still prefer to_xml just
> because it's shorter, but I'll go with term_to_xml if everyone else is
> happy with that.
>
> > I'm unhappy with all three suggestions.
> > term_to_xml would describe what it does.
> >
> >>> Index: library/to_xml.m
> >
> > I don't think this is of sufficiently general utility to belong in the
> > standard library.  It should go in extras.
> >
> It's going to be used in the compiler to generated browsable HLDS dumps
> and in the debugger in a visual term browser.  I could include it in
> the mdbcomp library in browser and then copy it to extras.  Is that
> better?
>
> >>> +
> >>> +:- type element_request
> >>> +	--->	from_functor_name(string)
> >>> +	;	from_functor_num(int).
> >>> +
> >>> +:- pragma memo(get_element/2).
> >>> +
> >> Using memoing in the standard library is going to mean that it no
> >> longer compiles for those grades that don't support it, e.g. the java
> >> and il grades.
> >
> > I agree.  It's not a good idea.  For a start, memo tables persist
> > through GC, so they are likely to be a type of space leak for
> > long-running applications (this is a hole in the memoing API IMHO).
> >
> > I'd leave it to the user to add memoed wrapper predicates if they need
> > them.
> >
> Why don't grades that don't support memoing just ignore the pragma?  I
> put memoing on this predicate because it's going to be called often
> with the same input.  The memo table should have at most (2 * the
> number of functors for the type) entries so I wouldn't imagine it would
> get too big.
>

I don't like the idea of a some grades silently ignoring memoing pragmas.
It should be something that the user has to explicitly switch off, if that
is what they want.

Cheers,
Julien.
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