[m-rev.] for review: Correct status of partial instantiation support

[Paul Bone]

On Wed, Mar 12, 2014 at 01:40:38PM +1100, Julien Fischer wrote:
>
> On Wed, 12 Mar 2014, Paul Bone wrote:
>
>> For review, does anyone know if there are more places throughout the
>> documentation that need correcting?  Thanks.
>>
>> Branches: master, version-14.01-branch
>>
>> ---
>>
>> Correct status of partial instantiation support
>>
>> In (at least) two places we say that partial instantiation doesn't work or
>> isn't supported.  To be more correct it works to some extent but is
>> 'experimental'.
>
> Experimental is a bit ambiguous, does it mean that: (1) it doesn't work,
> (2) it partially works, (3) it works but hasn't been extensively tested?
> I would prefer to say that support for partial instantiation is
> incomplete in the current implementation.

That it works but there are some caveats or you may run into bugs.  This is
my understanding of how well partial instantiation works anyway.

>>  Correcting this statement will confuse users of Mercury
>> less.  (It was pointed out to me by 1-2 people that this had confused them.)
>
> What exactly confused them?  That the compiler appeared to accept some
> programs containing partially instantiated terms without complaining
> even though the reference manual suggests otherwise?

Pretty much yes.

That the compiler accepts them, that there is code in list.m which defines
then, but doesn't use them.  Meanwhile documentation says that they're
unsupported, which was taken to mean don't work at all.


-- 
Paul Bone