[mercury-users] Mercury needs a Tutorial

[Marko Schuetz]

>>>>> "Ralph" == Ralph Becket <rwab1 at cam.sri.com> writes:

Ralph> Funnily enough, I started work on a tutorial last night.  A number of
Ralph> questions raise their heads:

Ralph> 1. What level should we pitch the tutorial at?  If we assume
Ralph> familiarity with (e.g.) Prolog then the tutorial will be of less use
Ralph> in an undergrad' teaching setting and no use at all in getting Mercury
Ralph> out to the non-LP masses.  I'm inclined (and this is the approach I
Ralph> started out with last night) to assume nothing other than a reasonably
Ralph> general computer science background and some past programming
Ralph> experience.  The trouble with this approach is that it's probably too
Ralph> verbose for LP experts who want to learn Mercury.

I think familiarity with a low level imperative language as well as a
higher level (somewhat) declarative language can be expected.

Ralph> 2. To teach by example or not?  I've started out with "Hello, World!"
Ralph> as is the tradition.  I'm planning on starting with short new programs
Ralph> to illustrate each new concept.  Does anybody have any strong feelings
Ralph> that this is the wrong way to go?

On the contrary, maybe it would be best to take this further in the
direction of "language X in X". I remember how helpful I found the
"Lisp in Lisp" chapters or Peyton-Jones and Lester "Implementing
Functional Languages: A Tutorial" or browsing the Smalltalk
sources... 

Ralph> This isn't going to work without feedback.  Are there people out there
Ralph> who can spare the odd ten minutes to look over what I've done and
Ralph> either recommend changes or improve it themselves?  We'll need
Ralph> relative novices to say whether anything is getting through and
Ralph> experts to check that nothing too far from the truth is said.

I could spare the odd ten minutes every once in a while. I do not have
experience with Mercury, but I do have experience with e.g. Haskell
and C. 

Marko