[mercury-users] Passing a multi-mode higher order predicate

[Jeff Thompson]

On 2/5/2012 7:52 AM, Julien Fischer wrote:
>
> Hi,
>
> On Sat, 4 Feb 2012, Jeff Thompson wrote:
>
>> Hello again.  In the program below, the compiler gives the following 
>> error due to "test(list.member)".
>>
>> test.m:010: In clause for `main(di, uo)':
>> test.m:010:   in argument 1 of call to predicate `test.test'/1:
>> test.m:010:   mode error: variable `V_6' has instantiatedness `free',
>> test.m:010:   expected instantiatedness was `(pred((ground >> 
>> ground), (ground
>> test.m:010: >> ground)) is semidet)'.
>>
>> The predicate list.member exists with the correct mode, so why does 
>> the compiler say the argument is free?
>
> In general, the current Mercury implementation. does *not* support
> creating higher-order terms from multi-moded predicates.   See the
> ``Creating higher-order terms'' of the reference manual (section 8.1).
> (There is an exception to this in the case where the are some curried
> higher-order arguments, but that does not apply here.)   The compiler
> usually generates a more useful error message for this; I'm not sure
> why it doesn't in this case.

Thanks for the clarification.  I see that in the language reference 
manual now. I came across this because I am trying to convert a code 
base of Prolog to Mercury which deeply uses bagof in multiple modes. My 
example comes from the following use case where Prolog can easily handle 
the following code whether X is var or nonvar:

test(X, Bag) :- bagof(X, member(X, [1, 2]), Bag).

If X is ground, then it uses list.member(int::in, list(int)::in).  But 
if it is nonvar, then it uses list.member(int::out, list(int)::in).   I 
cannot figure out an efficient way to duplicate bagof, much less the 
case where there are multiple modes. I know Mercury disputes the 
soundness of the semantics of bagof, but is there a paper which 
describes how to achieve the same multi-mode behavior?

Thanks,
- Jeff

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