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

[Ralph Becket]

Mercury was designed from the outset to support programming in the
large - that is, large projects written by several programmers.
To that end, Mercury is safety orientated in the sense that it
doesn't allow you to cut corners and does require you to declare
things that many other languages don't.  As you say, while it takes
time to get something through the compiler, you often find that
your program works just as intended and you don't need to go through
a debugging phase.

Prototyping languages have an almost complementary set of design
goals: they are not intended for large projects, they generally
don't expect projects to be written by multiple programmers (other
than library modules), they are usually dynamically typed (no need
to write type declarations etc.) and so forth.

You can get Mercury to infer type and mode declarations for you,
but it really isn't a prototyping language.

Personally, I think it's a bad idea to try to combine the two
sets of design goals in one language: the forgiving nature of the
prototyping flavour of such a language would inevitably lead to
programmers cutting corners in places where a stricter language, 
such as Mercury, would not allow.

Ralph

--
Ralph Becket      |      MSR Cambridge      |      rbeck at microsoft.com 

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