[mercury-users] Mercury needs a Tutorial

[Lee Naish]

In message <jbhfstxfwa.fsf at pc0067.pica.nl>Bas de Bakker wrote:
>Also, it is my experience that if you create documentation for
>software packages in anything other than manpages or info format, it
>will not be installed in a place where it is easy to find and users
>that have not installed the package themselves do not read it.

The solution is to have man/info pages which point to (eg) the Mercury
home page which has the tutorial amongst other things.  These formats
are not really designed for tutorials.

I think having an example-driven tutorial is not a bad idea, though I
think its worth having some additional background on this weird
"declarative" style of programming.  Example code is, I think, more
important once you understand the basics.  Eg, you know how to write
simple programs using lists and integers, you understand regular types
from other languages and you want to write some Mercury code for trees -
whats the syntax for type definitions?  The quickest way is to look at
an example.  Or you have progressed a bit further and want to write a
CGI program - if there is some code lying around which does something
very similar its going to save you heaps of work with getting
environment variables, reading characters, fixing escape sequences etc.
Or that Mercury-Visual Basic interface you need, or sockets...

	lee