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Date:Mon Apr 1 20:18:46 1993 
Subject:Re: pop9x and orthogonal procedures 
From:Luc Beaudoin 
Volume-ID:930401.01 





Apart from the problem of how the like of -datalist- and -datalength-
are (or ought to be) implemented is the problem of the Poplog
documentation which doesn't clearly specify what kind of arguments the
procedures can operate on.

REF DATA says:

> These procedures can be applied to most kinds of 'data structures', that
> is,  compound  items  which  can  be  considered  to  have   independent
> 'components' or 'elements' (this essentially includes everything  except
> numbers, ordinary procedures, and special objects like <true>,  <false>,
> <termin>, [], etc). See  the corresponding REF files  for the action  of
> these procedures on individual data types.

The procedures do some checking type checking, and exactly what type
checking is done is important and can easily be reported in the REF
documentation. (Certainly, it's important for the programmer that they
be.) I've come accross this problem myself and have found it to be quite
irritating.

So whether or not changes are made in the implementation, the REF files
ought to be improved.

Luc
-- 
-------------------------------------- -----------------------------------
Luc Beaudoin                          |  School of Computer Science
E-mail: lpb@cs.bham.ac.uk             |  University of Birmingham
voice:  +44 (21) 414-4766 or 3743     |  Birmingham B15 2TT, UK