[mercury-users] Re: Determinism detection (Was Newbie problem.)

[Fergus Henderson]

On 16-Jun-1999, Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> On 16-Jun-1999, Lee Naish <lee at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> > 
> > Determinism detection is so important for efficiency that LP languages
> > typically sacrifice abstraction.  Inlining is the most obvious way to
> > get both efficiency and abstraction.
> 
> Yes.  "For every problem, there is a solution which is simple, obvious --
> and wrong."
		;-)			<------ insert here

Sorry, I forgot the smiley.
That may have come across sounding a bit harsher than I intended.

Also, I didn't want to say that the inlining solution is wrong in
general, just that it is wrong for Mercury.  In the context of a
language like NUE-Prolog, the trade-offs are different; support for
programming-in-the-large was not an important design goal of NUE-Prolog,
and hence in that context there's less need to worry about supporting
design-by-contract and making interfaces explicit.

-- 
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"
PGP: finger fjh at 128.250.37.3        |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.
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