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mercury/compiler/notes/GLOSSARY
Fergus Henderson 876663ce77 Add a definition of "liveness".
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compiler/notes/GLOSSARY:
	Add a definition of "liveness".
1996-05-26 17:06:06 +00:00

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HLDS: The "High Level Data Structure". See hlds.m.
moduleinfo: Another name for the HLDS.
LLDS: The "Low Level Data Structure". See llds.m.
inst: instantiatedness. An inst holds three different sorts of
information. It indicates whether a variable is free, partially
bound, or ground. If a variable is bound, it may indicate
which functor(s) the variable can be bound to. Also,
an inst records whether a value is unique, or whether
it may be aliased.
liveness: this term is used to mean two quite different things!
(1) There's a notion of liveness used in mode analysis:
a variable is live if either it or an alias might be
used later on in the computation.
(2) There's a different notion of liveness used for code generation:
a variable becomes live (is "born") when the register or stack
slot holding the variable first acquires a value, and dies when
that value will definitely not be needed again within this procedure.
This notion is low-level because it could depend on the low-level
representation details (in particular, `no_tag' representations
ought to affect liveness).
mode: this has two meanings:
(1) a mapping from one instantiatedness to another
(the mode of a single variable)
(2) a mapping from an initial instantiatedness of a predicate's
arguments to their final instantiatedness
(the mode of a predicate)
proc (procedure): a particular mode of a predicate.
procinfo: the structure in HLDS which contains
information about a procedure.
predinfo: the structure in HLDS which contains information about
a predicate.
codeinfo: a structure used by codegen.m
switch: a disjunction which does a case analysis on the toplevel
functor of some variable.
super-homogenous form (SHF): a simplified, flattened form of goals, where
each unification is split into its component pieces; in particular,
the arguments of each predicate call and functor must be distinct
variables.