[mercury-users] User interface

[Fergus Henderson]

On 16-Dec-1997, George Greene <greeneg at cs.unc.edu> wrote:
> Have you ever heard of LPA (Logic Programming Associates) ?

Yes, although I've never used their Prolog implementation.

> It seems that you have the fastest variant of Prolog,
> while they have the prettiest.  Unfortunately, direct
> comparisons are difficult because your benchmarks ran 
> under Solaris, while their compilers run under Windows/NT
> and the Mac.

You could try running your own benchmarks to compare either
the Linux or Windows NT versions of Mercury with the
Windows NT version of LPA Prolog.  (If you do, then I for
one would be interested in the results.)

> But the basic idea is, they have a way
> for people to construct interactive/web applications using
> a Prolog-like syntax.
...
> it would be
> better if the variant of Prolog we were using had a library
> supporting a window- or web-oriented user-interface.  Because
> LPA has that capability, we are thinking about using them,
> even though they are slower and cost more.  But if there are
> any plans for you to add such a library to Mercury, we might
> be able to spare ourselves the expense of dealing with LPA.

Releases 0.7 and above of Mercury include a couple of libraries
for this sort of thing:

	- a tcl/Tk interface (that's the "window-oriented" user interface)

	- a library for processing HTML forms using CGI
	  (that's the "web-oriented" user interface).

My guess is that these are probably not quite as nice as what you might
get with LPA, but it is certainly possible to write interactive or Web
applications in Mercury using these tools.

-- 
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.