[mercury-users] mercury website (was Suggestion: new operator)

[Mattias Waldau]

>> Sorry, I rephrase: In any other USED language.
>
>Given that unification, mode declarations and backtracking can also be
>considered not to be in any "USED" language, why quibble over operators?

The main point I am trying to make is that Mercury has followed the normal
Prolog-tradition and kept Prolog bad syntax. The reason Prolog has this
syntax, is that it is easy to implement parser in Prolog for Prolog's kind
of syntax. That decision was made more than 20 years ago.

I do not understand why we have to continue this tradition, and still make
it worse by using '^' where every other normal program language would use
'->' or '.', using '@' where other languages use '[' or '(', and so on.

Mercury's main feature - like backtracking and unification (?) - must of
course be understood by the programmer, but I doen't see why these feature
must affect all of the syntax of the language.

Might it be so that Mercury needs this syntax in order to be a logic
programming language? Otherwise people would just say that it is an ML-type
of language with builtin searching?

/mattias

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