[mercury-users] the "extras" package

[Warwick HARVEY]

Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> On 29-May-1999, Warwick HARVEY <warwick at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> > Support for installing and using "extra" libraries is currently rather 
> > lacking in Mercury.
> 
> Well, the support for installing and using libraries could certainly be
> improved, but the current support is not that bad -- it's quite possible
> to install and use libraries, and the method for doing this is
> documented in the "Libraries" chapter of the Mercury User's Guide.

Indeed it is documented there.  I was not aware of this, as it wasn't there 
when I started using these things seriously.  :-)

> P.S.  I don't want to discourage Warwick from contributing
> improvements in this area.  It would be nice if we had better
> support for installing libraries, so that `mmake' would handle the
> `mmake complex_numbers.install' target automatically.  But I just
> didn't want people to get overly discouraged by Warwick's statement
> that our current support is "rather lacking".  Our current support is
> not as convenient as it could be, but it is comparable with the support
> that you typically get with compilers for other languages, such as C,
> C++, etc.

With other languages, one normally doesn't have to worry about wanting to 
use multiple different versions of the same library (i.e. "grades").  (In 
Mercury I'd suggest one almost always wants to install at least two 
different grades of a library one is developing --- the "standard" one, and 
a debugging one.)  This means that while Mercury probably does provide as 
much support as other languages, the amount of work to be done by the user 
still seems higher (to me, anyway).

Anyway, I withdraw my statement that the support is "rather lacking," and 
instead say that the support is "not up to the high standard I have come to 
expect from Mercury tools."

Since it annoys me (I do a *lot* of mucking around with user-built 
libraries and Mercury), I'm doing something about it.

Warwick

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