[mercury-users] Mercury applications, AI, backtracking

[Tyson Dowd]

On 14-Sep-1998, David Glen JEFFERY <dgj at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> 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.

s/beginning/busy and it's still true.

--
Tyson.