[mercury-users] An ugliness in the language (char literals)

[Ralph Becket]

I recoded most of the mtags program in Mercury because I don't have
Perl installed on my home machine (it's a religeous thing).  I got
an unpleasant shock.

If I want to write down a char literal, the only consistent syntax
for doing so is ('x').  This strikes me as a bit grotty.  The problem
arises in that
(1) some characters, e.g. `_', have to be escaped in quotes to avoid
being interpreted as non-chars, and
(2) some characters, e.g. `+', have to be bracketed otherwise the
parser expects them to be part of an, in this case infix, expression.

Ugh.  Ain't Prolog syntax ugly at times?

Ralph

--
Ralph Becket      |      MSR Cambridge      |      rbeck at microsoft.com 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
mercury-users mailing list
post:  mercury-users at cs.mu.oz.au
administrative address: owner-mercury-users at cs.mu.oz.au
unsubscribe: Address: mercury-users-request at cs.mu.oz.au Message: unsubscribe
subscribe:   Address: mercury-users-request at cs.mu.oz.au Message: subscribe
--------------------------------------------------------------------------