[mercury-users] Leveraging Perl

[Peter Schachte]

> For me,
> the real question is what is it that you can do in Perl that you
> cannot currently do in Mercury?

You can do anything in Mercury.  I think you should ask what you can't do *as
easily* in Mercury.

One thing you can't do as easily in Mercury is write a simple text file
filter.  For example, take a .html file containing cities and their current
weather observations as a big table, and extract and print out the
information for a particular city.  This is the kind of thing that's pretty
quick and easy to hack together in Perl.

I think Mercury could be good at this sort of thing with the right libraries.
I don't really know what these libraries would be, but I'd like to have
them....

Another thing Mercury is not as good at as Perl is rapid prototyping.  If
you were writing a text processing application in a speed programming
contest, would you choose Perl or Mercury?  I'd take Perl every time.

-- 
Peter Schachte <schachte at cs.mu.OZ.AU>  PL/1, "the fatal disease", belongs
http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~schachte/      more to the problem set than to the
Phone:  +61 3 8344 9166                solution set.
Fax:    +61 3 9348 1184                    -- E. W. Dijkstra 
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