[mercury-users] Paper on Mercury from AI practitioner's standpoint

[Ian MacLarty]

On 13 Jan 2005, at 11:26, Gregory D. Weber wrote:

> I'm writing a paper which I hope to present to an AI conference this
> spring, describing my experiences with Mercury in reimplementing the
> machine learning program CN2.  The paper will have no new information
> for experts in programming languages; it is simply a practitioner's
> report on his first use of Mercury for serious application programming.
>
> I invite comments to help ensure that I do not misrepresent
> the language to potential users.  A draft is posted at
> http://mypage.iu.edu/~gdweber/papers/drafts/mercury.pdf.
>

Hi Gregory,

Just a comment on the section entitled "Debugging Problems".  How much 
of an atom or term is printed can be controlled.  For example if you 
are using the "pretty" (formally "raw_pretty") print format you can 
issue a command "set depth 100" to print the term down to a depth of 
100.  Also did you try to use the interactive term browser which allows 
you to browse a term like a directory structure?  In my experience 
these two features eliminate the need for inserting print statements in 
the Mercury code (except for rare cases where there is a bug in the 
actual compiler that only manifests itself when debugging is turned 
off).  These features have been available in the debugger for a while 
now.  Which version were you using?

Also did you you use state variable syntax when threading the IO state? 
  This makes things a lot easier and preserves purity.

Ian.

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