[mercury-users] pragma compiled_memo for compile-time tabled evaluation

[André Platzer]

Hello Mercury users!

Is there any way to extend tabled evaluation to compile-time? As far as 
I understand, normal tabled evaluation memorises values computed at 
run-time. On an invocation with the same arguments, then mercury reuses 
those values instead of a second computation. This is very cool.

However, I wonder if there is a way to extend this idea to compile-time. 
So in case of a constant function like

    %% computes the number pi with a precision of 500 digits.
    :- func pi_to_500_digits = string.
    :- mode pi_to_500_digits = out is det.
    :- pragma memo(pi_to_500_digits/0).

after compilation, the program will compute pi to 500 digits only at the 
first time this constant is used, but repeat this computation for every 
program run. An improvement in this situation of constant functions (or 
at least functions depending upon arguments of a small finite domain) 
would be to perform the respective computation only once, at 
compile-time instead of repeatedly at each new program run. The compiler 
would evaluate the function at compile-time and store its tabled value 
instead of the machine code for performing the computation.

Of course, in case of numerical computations of different precisions and 
with different operand sizes, the result may depend on the particular 
machine. But the compiler could rely on the programmer to explicitly 
specify something like

   :- pragma compiled_memo(pi_to_500_digits/0).

if he wants compile-time tabled evaluation.

Are there any plans to include this into mercury, and is there any way 
to achieve similar things with the current mercury implementation? 
Storing terms with io__write/4 is not an option in case of 
data-structures containing functions or predicates.

Thanks for your comments and advice

André

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