Mercury Bugs - mercury
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IDProjectCategoryView StatusDate SubmittedLast Update
0000505mercuryFeature Requestpublic2020-05-01 16:462020-05-01 17:23
Reporterzs 
Assigned Tozs 
PrioritynormalSeverityminorReproducibilityhave not tried
StatusassignedResolutionopen 
PlatformOSOS Version
Product Version 
Target VersionFixed in Version 
Summary0000505: allow reference only to explicitly imported modules
DescriptionThis one could be viewed as either a feature request or a bug fix, depending
on perspective.

Have the type and mode checkers generate an error if a predicate defined
in the module being compiled has a reference to a type, inst, mode, predicate,
function, or typeclass that is not defined in an *explicitly* imported module.

The point is that the compiler implicitly imports some modules. For example,
if the module being compiled contains a try/catch goal, we implicitly import
the exception module, because our implementation of try/catch includes
adding references to entities defined in that module. Currently, this means
that such modules need not explicitly import exception even if the *rest* of
the module makes references to entities defined in exception.m, because
such references are satisfied by the implicit import. But this behavior looks
inconsistent to users, since they don't know or care how try/catch is
implemented, from their point of view, exception.m became available
to the module being compiled as if magic.

This access-as-if-by-magic can happen to some other modules
that we can import implicitly, and even to user modules, which can be
made available to the module being compiled if intermodule optimization
is enabled via the int-for-opt mechanism, whereby we read the interface
files of not-explicitly-imported modules because they are needed to
allow type- and mode-checking of code included in .opt files.
This is why the restriction would apply *only* when type- and mode-checking
predicates defined in the module being compiled; applying it to code
included from .opt files would defeat the purpose of reading int-for-opt files.
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Issue History
Date ModifiedUsernameFieldChange
2020-05-01 16:46zsNew Issue
2020-05-01 17:23zsAssigned To => zs
2020-05-01 17:23zsStatusnew => assigned