Functional syntax (Was: RE: [mercury-users] Hi, and determinism)

[Dan Sheppard]

> P.s. I have stopped using Mercury right know, since my predicates mostly
> were det or semidet. I am using Ocaml. However, I am very curious about HAL,
> since constraint programming needs a logic language, a functional isn't
> enough.

Thanks for the suggestions people, I'll look into them in more detail
when I'm feeling more awake. I just thought, though, I'd speak in
defence of the nondeterminism of mercury, even though I use it little,
when I do use it it's a very compact and neat representation for
something which would otherwise be tedious to program and messy.

Although Mercury's finest feature for me is its type system, I'm
pleased the non-determinism is there. There are some problems which so
obviously fit the "exponential explosion with vicious pruning"
solution, or the "try it for now, we can always undo all this and try
another if it proves faulty later" solution, that I'd be lost without it.

How does mercury compare to a random functional compiler if everything
in a program is det or semidet? Does the nondeterminism imposr much
baggage if it's not used? I'd guessed not.

Dan.
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