From fjh at cs.mu.OZ.AU Sun Dec 19 00:52:17 1999 From: fjh at cs.mu.OZ.AU (Fergus Henderson) Date: Sun, 19 Dec 1999 00:52:17 +1100 Subject: [mercury-announce] Announcing Mercury 0.9 Message-ID: <19991219005217.A28461@murlibobo.cs.mu.OZ.AU> We are pleased to announce the release of version 0.9 of the Mercury system. Mercury is a general-purpose programming language, designed and implemented by a group of researchers at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Mercury is based on the paradigm of purely declarative programming, and was designed to be useful for the development of large and robust real-world applications. It improves on existing logic programming languages by providing increased productivity, reliability and efficiency, and by avoiding the need for non-logical program constructs. Mercury provides the traditional logic programming syntax, but also allows the syntactic convenience of user-defined functions, smoothly integrating logic and functional programming into a single paradigm. For more information about Mercury, see the Mercury WWW page at . For information about where you can download Mercury 0.9, see the end of this message. The following list contains a brief summary of the major changes between release 0.8.1 and release 0.9. For full details, see or the NEWS file in the distribution. Changes to the Mercury language: * The Mercury type system now supports existentially quantified types. * We now allow abstract instance declarations. * We now support a simple form of user-defined infix operators. Changes to the Mercury standard library: * Exception handling support is now part of the standard library. * There are two new standard library modules `time' and `gc'. * We've added function versions of many of the predicates in the Mercury standard library. New library packages in the Mercury extras distribution: * We've added support for optional lazy evaluation. * The extras distribution now includes support for dynamic linking. * We've added some bindings to POSIX.3 functionality. Changes to the Mercury implementation: * The Mercury debugger (mdb) is much improved. It now includes support for interactive queries, command-line editing and command-line history, display of source line numbers, and setting breakpoints on source line numbers. The GNU Emacs interface provides a source-linked debugger. * We've removed the support for using a Prolog debugger on Mercury programs. * Mmake, the Mercury make tool, now includes better support for installing libraries. * We've added support for user-guided type specialization. * Numerous bug fixes. The Mercury distribution is available via anonymous ftp or WWW from the following locations: Australia: ftp://ftp.mercury.cs.mu.oz.au/pub/mercury/ We hope to be able to make it available at the following sites too, eventually: Sunsite and mirrors: (source distribution only) ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/Incoming/ ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/linux/devel/lang/mercury/ USA: ftp://ftp.cs.sunysb.edu/pub/XSB/mercury/ Sweden: ftp://ftp.csd.uu.se/pub/Mercury/ Greece: ftp://ftp.ntua.gr/pub/lang/mercury/ The home page of the project on the Web is . -- The Mercury Team Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering The University of Melbourne, Australia ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ mercury-announce mailing list administrative address: owner-mercury-announce at cs.mu.oz.au unsubscribe: Address: mercury-announce-request at cs.mu.oz.au Message: unsubscribe subscribe: Address: mercury-announce-request at cs.mu.oz.au Message: subscribe ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ From fjh at cs.mu.OZ.AU Mon Dec 20 05:37:46 1999 From: fjh at cs.mu.OZ.AU (Fergus Henderson) Date: Mon, 20 Dec 1999 05:37:46 +1100 Subject: [mercury-announce] Mercury 0.9 binary distributions Message-ID: <19991220053746.A22505@mundook.cs.mu.OZ.AU> Hi, There is unfortunately a bug in the binary distributions for Mercury 0.9 . Fortunately there is an easy work-around: instead of make install you just need to type make INSTALL_EMACS_SCRIPTS=scripts/gud.el install Apparently there is also a problem with the source distribution on some architectures if you run configure twice. The work-around here is just to make sure that you only run configure once. Probably we will release a 0.9.1 version sometime soon to correct these problems. -- Fergus Henderson | "I have always known that the pursuit WWW: | of excellence is a lethal habit" PGP: finger fjh at 128.250.37.3 | -- the last words of T. S. Garp. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ mercury-announce mailing list administrative address: owner-mercury-announce at cs.mu.oz.au unsubscribe: Address: mercury-announce-request at cs.mu.oz.au Message: unsubscribe subscribe: Address: mercury-announce-request at cs.mu.oz.au Message: subscribe ------------------------------------------------------------------------------