[mercury-users] Related? work

[Fergus Henderson]

On 18-Mar-1999, Sandy Harris <sandy.harris at sympatico.ca> wrote:
> Has anyone from the Mercury team looked at:
> 	Klaus Truemper "Effective Logic Computation",
> 	John Wiley 1998, ISBN 0-471-23886-4
> Methinks there are ideas there that might be useful.
...
> Author's home page, with links to free distribution of his
> Leibniz software:
> http://www.utdallas.edu/~klaus

The short answer is "No", we haven't looked at it --
thanks for the reference.  I had a quick glance at the WWW page
and I'll try to look at it in more detail when time permits.

> His stuff seems much less flexible than Mercury; it's not
> a general-purpose programming language, only a solver for
> SAT and minimisation problems, and he assumes those are in
> CNF form before he starts.
> 
> On the other hand, he seems to have some interesting solution
> methods and efficiency proofs for many of them.

Improving the support for constraint solving and adding more kinds
of constraint solver backends is one of my personal long-term aims
for Mercury.  Constraint solving is clearly an area in which the logic
programming paradigm excels, and so Mercury should definitely try
to take advantage of that.

-- 
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.