[mercury-users] Circular lists

[Peter Schachte]

On Thu, 27 Nov 1997, Richard A. O'Keefe wrote:

> In recent messages in this mailing list we have seen Mercury's C interface
> to do things that are (a) dangerous, and (b) NOT essential to performance.
> I have asked whether there could be or will be a tool that will warn about
> dangerous things while letting the straightforward uses through.  I did not
> ask about an option in the compiler to block such things, just a separate
> tool to WARN about them.

This isn't a separate tool, and it only helps for one potential problem, but
would it be possible for Mercury to declare non-di arguments passed to C
code `const' in the code it generates?  This could be selected by a compiler
switch, which would probably be off by default, so as not to cause problems
for existing code.  This would at least force users to cast if they wanted
to do something nasty to an input argument. 


-Peter Schachte			| Politicians are the same all over. They
pets at cs.mu.OZ.AU		| promise to build a bridge even where there is
http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~pets/	| no river. -- Nikita Krushchev 
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