[mercury-users] Pred defns

[Fergus Henderson]

On 03-Apr-1998, Peter Schachte <pets at students.cs.mu.oz.au> wrote:
> This is the situation as I see it:
> 
> 1.  Some groups of predicates have a lot of data to pass around.  This
>     naturally leads to the too-many-arguments syndrome.
> 
> 2.  This can be fixed by bundling disparate things together to make it
>     convenient to pass them around.  Unfortunately, this often leads to a
>     lot of packing and unpacking, which can make the code about as noisy as
>     before the bundling.
>
> 3.  If you're not going to pass data as many arguments, and not going
>     to bundle them, I can't see what else you can do but not pass them at
>     all, at least not visibly.  This leads to the desire for inter-predicate
>     argument threading.

Perhaps a better solution would be to provide more convenient ways of
doing bundling, packing and unpacking.

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
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