[mercury-users] unresolved polymorphism in read_term_from_string

[Julien Fischer]

On Sun, 12 Feb 2012, Jeff Thompson wrote:

> On 2/11/2012 9:52 PM, Julien Fischer wrote:
>> 
>> Hi,
>> 
>> On Sat, 11 Feb 2012, Jeff Thompson wrote:
>> 
>>> Hello again.  I've been working with the code parser, and gratified that 
>>> it does what I expect.  The code below correctly outputs "test".  However, 
>>> the predicate is declared as
>>> :- pred read_term_from_string(string::in, string::in, posn::out, 
>>> read_term(T)::out) is det.
>>> 
>>> and the compiler outputs the warning:
>>> test.m:004: In predicate `main'/2:
>>> test.m:004:   warning: unresolved polymorphism.
>>> test.m:004:   The variables with unbound types were:
>>> test.m:004:     V_14: term.term(T)
>>> test.m:004:     V_8: list.list(term.term(T))
>>> test.m:004:     V_6: varset.varset(T)
>>> test.m:004:     Term: term_io.read_term(T)
>>> test.m:004:   The unbound type variables will be implicitly bound to the
>>> test.m:004:   builtin type `void'.
>>> 
>>> Do I need to bind the type T to `void' when calling read_term_from_string? 
>>> If so, how?
>> 
>> You can't, the compiler is telling you that that is what *it* is doing in
>> this case.  It is doing that because it cannot infer a binding for the
>> type variable T.  There are two things you can do about this:
>> 
>> (1) ignore the issue by invoking mmc with the
>>     --no-warn-unresolved-polymorphism option.
>> 
>> (2) Provide some extra type information that allows the compiler to
>> infer a binding for T.
>> 
>> In a bit more detail:
>> 
>> The problem arises becuase the type of the 4th argument (Term) of the goal
>> 
>>    read_term_from_string("", "test.", _Posn, Term)
>> 
>> is read_term(T).  There is nothing else in the remainder of this program
>> that provides a binding for T.
>> 
>> Solution (2) involves using the with_type operation, ':', to annotate
>> the 4th argument of read_term_from_string with enough type information
>> to allow the binding for T to be determined, for example,
>> 
>>    read_term_from_string("", "test.", _Posn, Term : read_term(generic))
>> 
>> (generic/0 is defined in the term module.)
>
> Thank you for the detailed response.  I suspected there was a way to provide 
> the type information but couldn't find it in the language ref or examples.

Section 2.13.7 of th reference manual, ``Explicit type qualification''.

Julien.
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