[mercury-users] Mercury in academic teaching?

[Peter Schachte]

> On Mon, 9 Oct 2006, Jonathan Morgan wrote:
> >Think like a computer scientist - so long as we get the same
> >asymptotic efficiency, who cares about these minor constant factor
> >differences?
> 
> Almost everybody who isn't just coding for a class.

The point I was making was that the difference between min/3 returning
the same value twice when the numbers are equal, returning it only
once but still leaving a choicepoint, and having code that Mercury
would classify as 'det', is only one of efficiency, not correctness.
This distinction should be discussed much later in a subject on logic
programming, but would be difficult to delay in a subject using
Mercury.  If --infer-modes works well enough, that might be the
answer, but I'd have to use it pretty extensively before I was
confident it wouldn't give error messages that would create more
confusion than it avoided.


-- 
Peter Schachte              Certainly there are things in life that money
schachte at cs.mu.OZ.AU        can't buy, but it's very funny -- Did you ever
www.cs.mu.oz.au/~schachte/  try buying them without money?
Phone: +61 3 8344 1338          -- Ogden Nash 
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