[mercury-users] Re: Fergus' hack

[Bart Demoen]

Fergus wrote:
> > But adding the extra forward/backward argument to p
> > gives the impression that the same relation exists between X and Y in
> > both modes,
> 
> Huh?  Why do you think that?

I apologize for making the same mistake over and over again - blame it
on my age and perception of programming; Fergus is perfectly right,
the meaning of a logic program does not depend on the actual names of
the constants and I should never, never, never again find any
intuitive meaning in the name of the constants.
In fact, to get rid of this extremely bad habit, I should send all
programs through a preprocessor which changes systematically
superficially meaningful names (the ones that appear in a dictionary
say) into something completely meaningless (even for me) like p1 p2
etc. It will enhance my declarative reading of programs.
And I should do the same with C programs because the procedural
meaning of them doesn't depend either on the names of the variables
and functions.
And maybe I should take this even further and rename all constants in
my e-mails, so that nobody would ever be tempted to see an injustified
meaning in them.
I will start immediatly.


p106

p107 p108