Re: Curry report updated

From: Sven Panne <Sven.Panne_at_informatik.uni-muenchen.de>
Date: Fri, 20 Nov 1998 15:22:57 +0100

A few remarks to the new Curry report:

   * IMHO it would be nicer if "success" was a *Constructor* of type
     Constraint. This would allow pattern matching on constraints. As it
     stands, the translation of conditional rules in section D.3 doesn't
     make much sense: In the rule (success => x) = x, success would be
     a simple variable. OK, it's only there for explanation, but with
     this small alteration, Success would not need any special treatment.
     BTW, is (=>) rigid or flexible? (It could be the case that
     success is meant to be a new keyword, but that would make things
     even worse.)

   * Page 29, section 9: Change the reference to Boolean functions to
     functions returning a constraint.

   * It's not clear to me, if the pragmas flex/rigid and optmatch are
     meant to be orthogonal. If they are, optmatch should get a
     sibling pragma like funcmatch are whatsoever. If they are not,
     it should be made clear, which evaluation strategy accompanies
     optmatch.

   * Page 42, Prelude: getLine contains a nice little LaTeX-Bug...

   * As usual, I strongly recommend including a machine-usable grammar
     for Curry in the report, something like

        http://www.javasoft.com/docs/books/jls/html/19.doc.html

     for Java. Lessons learned from the past include the fact that
     ambiguous grammars or LR(k) grammars with k>1 are not only
     difficult for computers, but for humans, too... :-)

But the picture as a whole is encouraging: The language gets simpler,
but more powerful and orthogonal!

Cheers,
   Sven

-- 
Sven Panne                                        Tel.: +49/89/2178-2235
LMU, Institut fuer Informatik                     FAX : +49/89/2178-2211
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http://www.pms.informatik.uni-muenchen.de/mitarbeiter/panne
Received on Fr Nov 20 1998 - 15:31:00 CET

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