[mercury-users] Difference of Predicate Declaration from Implementation

[Mark Brown]

On 04-Sep-2007, Stormie Stormie <stormie at hotmail.it> wrote:
> 
> 
> I have question from calculator.m example in mercury
> 
> 1) Arguments in the predicate declaration (e.g. fullexpr) are different  from its implementation.
> e.g. arguments for fullexpr are three, but it just takes one (i.e. X) in its implementation.
> Why is that so? 

The clauses are DCG-rules, rather than ordinary rules.  See section 2.11
of the reference manual.

> 
> 2) What is the purpose of ['\n'] 

That is a DCG-goal, which is described in section 2.12.

(Note that state variables provide a similar benefit to DCGs, but are
more flexible, and are thus usually preferred.)

> -------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> % Simple recursive-descent parser.
> 
> :- pred fullexpr(expr::out, list(char)::in, list(char)::out) is semidet.
> 
> fullexpr(X) -->
>     expr(X),
>     ['\n'].

For example, this DCG-rule is equivalent to:

	fullexpr(X, V0, V) :-
		expr(X, V0, V1),
		V1 = ['\n' | V].

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Mark.

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