Mercury and PDC Prolog

[Fergus Henderson]

In mail to mercury at cs.mu.oz.au,
Bruce Gould <bcgould at enteract.com> wrote:

> I'm currently programming in PDC Prolog, which is a strongly typed
> Prolog. I believe I am getting execution speeds close to that of a C
> program. On the surface, it sounds like there are some similarities
> between Mercury and PDC.

Yes, Turbo Prolog (the predecessor to PDC Prolog) was one of the
languages that influenced Mercury.

> Are you aware of PDC?

Yes.

> If so, can you tell me the differences between PDC
> and Mercury?

I posted an article to comp.lang.prolog describing the
differences between Turbo Prolog and Mercury a year or two ago --
try searching for it with Dejanews.

Note that PDC's latest product, Visual Prolog, has in fact
incorporated some of Mercury's features,
e.g. the keywords `erroneous' and `failure',
higher-order predicates (done in a differently to how
they are done in Mercury, however), and
functions (although they did a fairly hacky job of it).

Some of the major language differences are

	- Mercury is a "pure" logic language, whereas Turbo/PDC/Visual
	  Prolog is not;

	- Mercury has a more flexible type system (parametric polymorphism). 
	  [And coming soon: type classes! (similar to Java interfaces)]

There are also some implementation differences:

	- Visual Prolog comes with a good GUI environment,
	  Mercury does not (although it does work well with
	  standard Unix tools, e.g. emacs).

	- Visual Prolog runs on x86 machines only, whereas
	  Mercury runs on a variety of architectures (e.g. x86, Alpha,
	  Sparc, Mips, PowerPC).  On the other hand, VP runs on
	  Windows, DOS, Unix, and OS/2, whereas Mercury currently runs
	  only on Unix and Windows.  (Other ports would of course be
	  possible -- see the archives of the mercury-users mailing list.)

And some other differences:

	- Mercury is free, and comes with source code,
	  whereas Visual Prolog costs money and does not
	  include source code.

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au>   |  "I have always known that the pursuit
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>   |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
PGP: finger fjh at 128.250.37.3         |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.