Hi all, Manuel Chakravarty wrote:
My conclusion is that we should not include FDs or ATs into the standard at the moment. Standardising FDs as a stopgap measure may easily put us into the same situation that we are having with records at the moment. Nobody is really happy with it, but we don't dare to change it either.
Martin Sulzmann
The situation here is clearly different. Whatever comes next (after FDs) will be a conservative extension. So, standardising FDs is a good thing because they have proven to be a useful (somewhat essential for MPTCs) feature. Hence, I will go with Simon: H' should have MPTC + FDs, but not ATs.
I basically agree with Simon PJ and Martin: MPTCs are necessary for H', and MPTCs pretty much necessitates at least some limited form of FD/AT. Thus I view FD/AT as so important, that I think it is a secondary concern if it ends up being a stop gap measure. Moreover, it seems to me that FD/AT declarations in practical applications amounts to very little code. Thus, the likely work impact if FD/AT is completely replaced with some other mechanism providing the same functionality should be very limited. This is unlike records, say, where record notation is likely to be used pretty much throughout an application. Also, the alternative of NOT having FD/AT would seem to lead to rather convoluted solutions in many cases, so the work of adapting non FD/AT MPTC code to an hypotetical H'' setting where an FD/AT replacement is available, is potentially quite big. But of couse, the above discussion on likely change impact is just my gut feeling. My key argument is that MPTCs and thus some form of FDs/ATs are really important in practice. All the best, /Henrik -- Henrik Nilsson School of Computer Science and Information Technology The University of Nottingham nhn@cs.nott.ac.uk This message has been checked for viruses but the contents of an attachment may still contain software viruses, which could damage your computer system: you are advised to perform your own checks. Email communications with the University of Nottingham may be monitored as permitted by UK legislation.