[mercury-users] Mercury applications, AI, backtracking

[David Glen JEFFERY]

On 14-Sep-1998, Don Smith <dsmith at cs.waikato.ac.nz> wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I am wondering: is it reasonable to expect Mercury to succeed as a _mainstream_
> programming language when the vast majority of conventional applications
> would seem to involve little or no backtracking? (But see below.)
> 
> Sure, Mercury has good language support for expressing deterministic code,
> and it tries to pay for nondeterminism only where it's really needed.
> But if my application is quite deterministic (as the vast majority of 
> conventional applications are), then why would I choose Mercury over, 
> say, Haskell or Clean? 

I feel that it is easier to express complex data flow in Mercury than it is
in functional languages. In particular, returning multiple values from a
procedure doesn't need to involve tupling/untupling. For the beginning
programmer, this is a significant bonus, IMHO.


dgj
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