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

[Manuel Hermenegildo]

 > Why not just use Prolog?  Who wants to bugger around with
 > declarations and types and stuff just for scripting? For
 > programs that size, surely you can get it right without
 > too much help from the interpreter?

since Thomas brings up the issue, I just wanted to point out that some
Prolog-type systems (e.g., Ciao) come with a very convenient script
interpreter.

 > Mercury can infer the declarations, and I like types :) And anyway, small
 > scripts have a tendency to grow, an errors in even small scripts can cause
 > problems, as Ralph demonstrated...

Well, a nice thing in the case of Ciao is that you can easily and
gradually grow beyond the small script. You can add declarations
(and/or infer them, and then check them), modules, documentation,
etc. as needed. In other words, there is a path from "programming in
the small / prototyping" to "programming in the large". All right, all
right, I can already hear all the flak from the purists...

Cheers,

Manuel

-- 

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
herme at fi.upm.es                      | Manuel Hermenegildo                 
+34-91-336-7435 (Work)               | Facultad de Informatica, UPM
+34-91-352-4819 or 336-7412 (FAX)    | Universidad Politecnica de Madrid   
http://www.clip.dia.fi.upm.es/~herme | 28660-Boadilla del Monte, MADRID SPAIN
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