[mercury-users] Using existential quantification?

[Douglas Auclair]

Dear all,

I'm curious about existential quantifiers.  I'm familiar using them for 
first-order logical proofs:

(3x)(x <- ~p)  % '3' means 'there exists'

But I'm not understanding their utility in Mercury.  I've read the Mercury 
Language reference manual on existential qualifiers, but the discussion and 
examples will need some time and further explanation to me for them to sink 
in.

That's what I'm asking here.  Are there papers (on the web) or books that 
discuss using existential quantification in programming languages that I can 
study?  Do you have examples of code (besides std_util's univ) that use 
existential quantification?  Could you please provide some guidelines for 
what classes of problems should use existential quantification?

Thanks.

Douglas Auclair

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