[mercury-users] Mercury needs a Tutorial

[Fred Yankowski]

As someone who is intrigued by Mercury and is looking for an excuse to
learn it and use it in my work, I'm delighted to hear of the plans to
develop and share a tutorial.

One suggestion on the content of the tutorial: it is helpful when
tutorials compare and contrast language features with similar features
in well-known languages such as C and Pascal.  Ullman does this quite
well in his "Elements of ML Programming" book.  This is particularly
useful for "gotchas" where features _don't_ work like their
counterparts in other languages.

Also, for Mercury to be generally useful to me, I need to know how to
fit it into larger heterogenous systems comprising C, C++, Perl,
Python, and/or (yuck) Visual Basic code.  For example, how can I
structure an application that runs Mercury code as part of servicing a
web CGI call?  [You can see by this question that I haven't studied
the available documentation and examples at any length.  The
learning-cost/likely-usefulness ratio is just too high right now.  I
expect a tutorial to lower that numerator value and, with any luck,
increase the denominator as well.]

-- 
Fred Yankowski          fcy at mcs.net         www.mcs.net/~fcy/
Software Systems Engineer   tel: +1.630.879.1312   fax: .1370
38W242 Deerpath Road, Batavia, IL 60510, USA