Subject: Re: swi jpl character coding

From: Paul Singleton <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 18 Dec 2000 23:22:17 +0000

Jan Wielemaker wrote:

> You mean write_canonical should write floats at maximum precision?

Without loss of information, so that some complementary 'read' can
reconstruct the identical value (I'm afraid I *do* believe in the
comparability of floats :-)

> With recombinant you mean ?- X = foo(A), Y = bar(X,X). (i.e. a term
> with shared subterms)?

yes

> Basically there is no way to distinguish this
> from bar(foo(A), foo(A)), except if you use set_arg/3 to modify the
> shared subterm.

(you've forgotten about PL_same_functor() already ;-)

> You want this for compactness of the written term?

yes, so that terms which are manageable on the heaps don't explode
unnecessarily when written.

Paul S.