[mercury-announce] Announcing Mercury 0.9.1

[Tyson Dowd]

We are pleased to announce the release of version 0.9.1 of the Mercury
system.

Mercury 0.9.1 is an update to version 0.9.  The 0.9.x series of releases
is intended to be a stable release, based on 0.9 with only bug fixes
applied.  More experimental new features will be available only on the
daily development releases.  

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
<http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/mercury/>.  For information about where
you can download Mercury 0.9.1, see the end of this message.

The following list contains a brief summary of the major
changes between release 0.8.1 and release 0.9.1.  For full details,
see <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/mercury/download/release-0.9.html>
or the NEWS file in the distribution.

Changes in Mercury 0.9.1
------------------------

This release is primarily a bug-fix release.  
It fixes some bugs with the binary distribution of 0.9,
stops the compiler accepting some incorrect inst declarations,
fixes a bug in exception handling and a problem with the source
distribution where `configure' did the wrong thing on some architectures
if you ran it twice.

In addition, Morphine has been added to the extras distribution.
Morphine is a trace analysis system, which allows Mercury programs to be
debugged and dynamically analyzed using a Prolog interface.  You need
the ECLiPSe Prolog system to use Morphine.  See the README file in the
Morphine directory for more details.

Changes in Mercury 0.9
----------------------

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:
* Mmake, the Mercury make tool, now includes better support for
  installing libraries.
* 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.
* We've added support for user-guided type specialization.
* Numerous bug fixes.

Downloading Mercury
-------------------

The Mercury distribution is available via anonymous ftp or WWW
from the following locations.

We have a new web-site we are trying out, which offers high-speed
downloads (as well as other services we may decide to use in future).
Some of the main files are available here:

	Worldwide:
		http://sourceforge.net/project/?group_id=1126

The full system and daily snapshot releases are available at out
primary site:

        Australia:
                ftp://ftp.mercury.cs.mu.oz.au/pub/mercury/

Mirrors:

        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/

The home page of the project on the Web is <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/mercury/>.

--
The Mercury Team <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/mercury/contact/people.html>
Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering
The University of Melbourne, Australia
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