[m-dev.] for review: improvements for record syntax

[Fergus Henderson]

On 07-Dec-2000, Simon Taylor <stayl at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> 
> Fergus wrote:
> > Richard O'Keefe's guidelines about argument ordering, which are
> > explained in his book The Craft of Prolog, say that collection types
> > such as array should precede indexes.  The reason for this is to be
> > consistent with the suggested ordering for in/out mode arguments,
> > namely that in mode arguments should precede out mode arguments.
> > The point here is that you might want to define a mode of `elem'
> > that nondeterministically produces all the elements of the
> > array:
> > ...
> 
> This doesn't matter so much if the non-standard ordering
> is not visible in calls to the function.

True, but the non-standard ordering is still visible in the
declaration and definition of the function.

Actually it would be nice to allow record syntax in function
definitions too.  For example:

	[H|_] ^ head = H.
	[_|T] ^ tail = T.
	([_|T] ^ head := H) = [H|T].
	([H|_] ^ tail := T) = [H|T].

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