[mercury-users] Problem installing with grade java

[Fergus Henderson]

On 18-Jul-2001, Holger Krug <hkrug at rationalizer.com> wrote:
> 
> What you are doing (have done), I suppose, is to extend Mercury's C
> Interface to other languages like C#, maybe Java, and so on. If you
> proceed this way implementing several language ports, the Mercury
> project will become almost unmanageable out of the following reasons:
> 
> * Every language port adds new pragma's to the Mercury sources.

Every new *platform* port may require new foreign language code in the
Mercury standard library implementation.

But if we add support for interfacing with a new language,
on a platform that we already support, then we won't need to
add any new pragmas to the Mercury standard library implementation.

> After having
>   ports to C, C#, Java, Python and Perl etc. the Mercury sources are a
>   huge collection of pragmas with the percentage of real Mercury code being
>   almost 0.

I think that vastly exaggerates the extent of the problem.

> * The maintainers of the standard library files have to review changes
>   in all of the language ports, which is very time consuming and makes no
>   sense.  The other solution would be to have several maintainers for one
>   single file, one for each language port, nothing to be glad with.

I haven't heard *the reviewers* complaining about this so far ;-)

The converse side to this is that if you add a new procedure (or if you modify
an existing one) that needs to be implemented in several languages then you
need to modify code in several different files, rather than just one.

> * The people doing language ports of libraries have to change the
>   Mercury source file. They have to understand Mercury more than
>   necessary.

Not much more; just the foreign language interfacing pragmas
(and string literals).

They'll need to understand a fair bit about Mercury anyway, in order
to understand the specifications of the procedures that they
are trying to implement.


Your suggestion does have some merit, and would probably help *a bit*,
but I don't think it would help *a lot*.

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
The University of Melbourne         |  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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