[mercury-users] "What do you think about Mercury ?"

[Fergus Henderson]

On 19-Aug-1999, Peter Ross <petdr at cs.mu.OZ.AU> wrote:
> On 16-Aug-1999, Renaud Bournonville <rbournon at info.fundp.ac.be> wrote:
> > - Couldn't you find these in other programming languages ? Why ?
> 
> You can't find the static checking in any other logic programming
> language.  This is because the Prolog has non logical predicates.

That's not entirely true. 

There is a relationship between the static checking and purity, but it
goes the other way around.  Static checking is important for ensuring
purity in an efficient manner (NU-Prolog had a quite expressive pure
subset, but that subset was unfortunately unusably inefficient for many
tasks, due to the cost of the run-time groundness checks).  But you
don't need to have purity in order to get static checking.
Turbo/Visual Prolog is a good example.  Visual Prolog now has static
checking which is quite similar to Mercury's in many ways.  
(However, Visual Prolog's type system lacks polymorphism, which IMHO makes
it intolerably inexpressive.)

-- 
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.
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