Rob Arthan wrote:

I have a problem building ProofPower with the latest Poly/ML. The build goes into a loop at a point where it opens a certain structure. This will be the first time Poly/ML has had to pretty-print a value of the type THM that represents theorems. This type has a circularity passing through a ref and a certain dictionary data type. I have attached a very cutdown version of the failing code. The cutdown version behaves slightly differently in that I see some never-ending output, while the ProofPower build just goes into a silent busy hang.

The dictionary type OE_DICT that causes the problem is an amalgam of two simpler dictionary data types S_DICT (simple dictionaries using an association list) and E_DICT (efficient dictionaries using a hash key and a binary tree). Somewhat oddly the problem doesn't happen if I replace OE_DICT with either S_DICT or E_DICT even though the representation type for OE_DICT is just S_DICT * E_DICT.

I'm not sure what's happening in detail in your example but there has been a significant change in the way printing works in the latest version. A printing function (and an equality function, if appropriate) is now compiled for each type as it is created. This means that printing and type-specific equality functions are available in a wider range of cases than they used to be, particularly in functors.

Previously, the code checked whether there was circularity and just printed "..." when it detected it. That's not really possible with the current code so it relies on the print depth (PolyML.print_depth) to stop infinite looping. Setting print_depth to 10 in your example produces much more sensible output.

The only simple solution I can suggest is to set the default for the printer depth to something much smaller, perhaps 10. There's probably no reason for the current, essentially unconstrained, print depth.

I also noted in passing that types declared as abstypes are now equality types. Was this a conscious attempt to implement one of the Successor ML proposals?

No, it was something I noticed while working on the printing and equality code. An early draft of Standard ML explicitly said that abstypes were not equality types outside the "with...end" block and that's what Poly/ML implemented. When I looked again recently I couldn't actually see that anywhere in either the ML90 or ML97 definitions and it seems to conflict with the way equality is handled in the semantics. For that reason I took out the code which switched off equality.

Regards, David