[mercury-users] Native garbage collector for Mercury

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

	> 	Logic programming in general, and Mercury in particular, are not 
	>       going to become mainstream languages until it is shown that they 
	>       can be used to create an operating system.
	> 	
	> Just how many operating systems are written in COBOL?  Or BASIC?  Or Perl?
	> How many *available* operating systems are written in Java?
	
	These are all dying programming languages, with the notable
	exception of perl.
	
Their present status is totally irrelevant,
although it's news to me that Java is dying.
On which planet is that true?

The point is that they *became* very popular, that they became
*mainstream*, without ever having an operating system written in them.
I could add the XBASE family of languages, which also became
extremely popular, without being even remotely capable of serving
as a systems implementation language.

It's also rather doubtful whether Basic is dying.  In order to examine
and edit slides on a Macintosh, I asked for Powerpoint to be installed.
What I was actually given was _all_ of Office 98, and that includes VBA
(which, I need hardly remind you, means Visual *Basic* for Applications).

The point is simply that a language doesn't have to be a SIL in order
to become `mainstream'.  It has to be very useful for *something*, but
that `thing' doesn't have to be OS implementation.