[mercury-users] Automatic module initialisation?

[Fergus Henderson]

On 22-Feb-1999, Warwick Harvey <wharvey at cs.monash.edu.au> wrote:
> Fergus wrote:
> > Out of curiousity, why do you need an initialisation function?
> 
> Well, HAL has ``global variables''.  In HAL, the user provides 
> initialisation code for these in their declarations, so that they always 
> have a valid value at any point in the ``main'' body of code.

What guarantees does HAL provide the programmer with about the order of
initialization?

> (And is the web mailing list search facility broken?

Yes, currently it is broken.  A few weeks ago we ran into some problems
because the search tool that we are using (htdig) was using >256M of
memory during the process of creating the search index database.
I installed a new version of htdig which had some memory leaks
fixed and did a few other things to fix the memory usage problem.
But now we seem to have run into some other problems, one of which
is that the root disk partition on that machine is full.  <Sigh>

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "Binaries may die
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |   but source code lives forever"
PGP: finger fjh at 128.250.37.3        |     -- leaked Microsoft memo.