[mercury-users] This Year's Mercury Entry for the ICF 2001 Contest

[Michael Day]

> We clearly need a declarative scripting language.

Would interpreted Mercury suffice?

The main problem I have with replicating shell scripts in Mercury is that
it feels like I should be able to achieve a concise and natural syntax
that mirrors existing shell scripts, but in practice threading the
io__state screws everything up, so I can't do:

	( if exists("some file") then
		...

and must instead do:

	exists("some file", Res),
	( if { Res = yes } then
		...

and numerous other examples. (What if the shell script idioms "prog1 &&
prog2" and "prog1 || prog2" could be expressed simply as "prog1, prog2"
and "prog1 ; prog2" in Mercury... rather neat).

Is it more practical to try and achieve this in Mercury, or a less
ambitious Prologish language specifically designed for it perhaps?

Michael

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