[mercury-users] Is there a sockets library ?

[Michel Vanden Bossche]

Mark,

On 31-Jan-1999, Mark Ng <markn at students.cs.mu.oz.au> wrote:

> Does anyone know if there is a sockets library for Mercury around ?

Mission Critical (MC, Belgium) has built one in the context of our ARGo
project. I'll see with Paul Massey (the computer scientist that built it)
and Dominique de Waleffe (in charge of all the projects at MC) how you can
get it (I hope you don't ask it because one of your professor has asked to
build one as a test :-)

A short note on ARGo.

ARGo is an ESPRIT project (funded equally by the European Commission and
the commercial organizations that are working on it) whose aim is to boost
Mercury. 

We think that Mercury is one of the best ideas that came out of the logic
programming community over the past few years and we think that the
implementation of Mercury has reached a stage at which its
industrialization can be seriously considered.

MC is the coordinator of the project. Other partners are Thomson-Detexis
(France), INRIA (Mireille Ducasse, deebugging), University of Leuven
(Maurice Bruynooghe, longer term issues such as liveness analysis),
University of Namur (Baudouin Le Charlier, methodoly for developing
Mercury programs) and, of course, University of Melbourne (Zoltan Somogyi
was at our last project review meeting).

Our main objectives are:

1. the development of a commercially viable version of Mercury running
under NT and well integrated with COM (Component Object Model);

2. development of state-of-the-art debugging tools for Mercury;

3. the study of programming methodology for Mercury, involving development
of some substantial applications;

4. the study of longer term issues.

The "vision" is that Mercury is one of the best idea to develop - much
more scientifically (i.e. with a better balance bewteen fundamentalism and
pragmatism)- mission-critical or business-critical applications. The
tactic is to have a fairly robust and commercially acceptable environment
on NT, due to the momentum of that platform (and Melbourne has done and is
doing an outstanding job on Unix).

Regards,

Michel Vanden Bossche
CEO
Mission Critical