16 Impurity declarations

In order to efficiently implement certain predicates, it is occasionally necessary to venture outside pure logic programming. Other predicates cannot be implemented at all within the paradigm of logic programming, for example, all solutions predicates. Such predicates are often written using the foreign language interface. Sometimes, however, it would be more convenient, or more efficient, to write such predicates using the facilities of Mercury. For example, it is much more convenient to access arguments of compound Mercury terms in Mercury than in C, and the ability of the Mercury compiler to specialize code can make higher-order predicates written in Mercury significantly more efficient than similar C code.

One important aim of Mercury’s impurity system is to make the distinction between the pure and impure code very clear. This is done by requiring every impure predicate or function to be so declared, and by requiring every call to an impure predicate or function to be flagged as such. Predicates or functions that are implemented in terms of impure predicates or functions are assumed to be impure themselves unless they are explicitly promised to be pure.

Please note that the facilities described here are needed only very rarely. The main intent is for implementing language primitives such as the all solutions predicates, or for implementing interfaces to foreign language libraries using the foreign language interface. Any other use of ‘impure’ or ‘semipure’ probably indicates either a weakness in the Mercury standard library, or the programmer’s lack of familiarity with the standard library. Newcomers to Mercury are hence encouraged to skip this section.