[m-dev.] for review: Announcing Mercury 0.8

[Zoltan Somogyi]

> Mercury is a new 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

Don't put real-world in quotes. The quotes act as a negation operator :-(

> The following list contains a brief summary of the major new features
> in releases 0.8.  For full details, see the NEWS file in the distribution

s/releases/release

> or <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/mercury/release.html-0.8.html>.

Put the web reference first, and maybe delete the NEWS file reference.

> The type system now includes support for Haskell-style type classes.

You should also mention the limited support for existential types.

> The following list summarizes the major new features in release 0.7.2.
> For full details, see the NEWS file in the distribution or
> <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/mercury/release.html-0.7.2.html>.

You should make clear that the above differences were between 0.7.2 and 0.8,
and that the following ones are between 0.7 and 0.7.2.

Apart from that, it looks fine, but you should probably wait for at least
one more review.

Zoltan.