[mercury-users] Mercury as a 1st class prototyping language ?

[Fergus Henderson]

On 27-Oct-2000, david wallin <david at wallin.cx> wrote:
> 
> Would you say that Haskell syntax has the same/better/worse 
> readability (to a human eye) compared to Prolog syntax ?

IMHO:

Prolog syntax is easy, but understanding Prolog programs can be very
difficult, because of problems related to semantics rather than
syntax.  In particular, if the types, modes and determinism are not
carefully documented, it can be very hard to figure out what a Prolog
program is doing.

Haskell syntax has a much tougher learning curve.  For Prolog, I picked
up the syntax quite quickly, but for Haskell it took me a long time
before I could look at a Haskell program and immediately parse it.
Haskell programs can also be hard to understand because they are often
very abstract, making great use of higher-order functions.
However, once you do get the point where you can easily "grok" Haskell
syntax, it does have its advantages; in particular, it's a bit more
concise, especially for higher-order code.

-- 
Fergus Henderson <fjh at cs.mu.oz.au>  |  "I have always known that the pursuit
                                    |  of excellence is a lethal habit"
WWW: <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh>  |     -- the last words of T. S. Garp.
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