[mercury-users] Hi, and determinism

[Fergus Henderson]

On 29-Jan-2001, Thomas Conway <conway at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 29, 2001 at 10:08:54AM EST, Dan Sheppard wrote:
> > I try to avoid cascades of semidet predicates for these two reason
> > (which are really a minor recurrance of the prolog "no" problem), I
> > wonder if there's some other way of dealing with them? Perhaps there
> > are programming styles within the existing language I have failed to
> > notice which would help alleviate these problem?
> 
> One thing you can do in many cases is make your predicates det and
> return a bool.

Another alternative along these lines is to use functions returning bool.
If the boolean is the only output, then this is a preferable alternative, IMHO.
Instead of

> :- pred has_prop(my_structure, bool).
> :- mode has_prop(in, out) is det.
> 
> has_prop(f(...), yes) :-
> 	....

write

	:- func has_prop(my_structure) = bool.

	has_prop(f(...)) = yes :-
		...

Note that you don't need to declare the mode or determinism, since for
functions you can just use the default `(in, in, ...) = out is det'.
So this is slightly more concise.

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