[mercury-users] To the developers of Mercury!

[Jonathan Morgan]

On 1/6/07, RMJ <radse1 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Lets face it, an IDE only for Mercury should have the best/perfect
> highlighter and code completion. I don't think vim's falls in that
> categeory. It's up to the developers now to make it possible for me to make
> such a highlighter and code completing features, or not.

That being the case (and I would agree with it), the vim syntax file
(and the operator list linked to by Simon) are probably the most
recent collections of keywords and operators.  mercury.vim was last
updated on the 23/10/2006, showing that it continues to be updated.

While I would agree that vim's syntax highlighting is not necessarily
the best available, it does have the advantage that it is fairly quick
to write, and vim is available on most systems (non-Windows ones,
anyway).

> Merca (that's its name) is usable now (even it compiles and runs what you
> create in it) but still there are several gaps that must be filled before I
> release it for testing. If the developers (of Mercury) decided to, then it
> will be distributed with Mercury. Otherwise, I can send it to any one who
> requests it as long as I'm on this list and improving/adding features to
> Merca while I'm building my own project using Mercury.
> I hope Mercury developers read our postings. Well maybe they don't want a
> contributed IDE for their work, who knows?

There are two places that your work could go.  One is mercury-extras,
the other is on some open source hosting site (e.g. Sourceforge,
Google project hosting, CodePlex, etc.).  If you wished to place it in
mercury-extras then you would need to get commit permission from the
developers.

I am not convinced that mercury-extras is the best place for the IDE,
as it would impose additional dependencies on FreePascal, etc.
Whether or not it goes in mercury-extras, there should be a pointer to
it somewhere in the README file for mercury-extras, so that people can
discover it.

One thing that I think would be a major improvement over vim's Mercury
syntax file would be highlighting foreign_{proc, code} with the syntax
highlighting of the target language, rather than just as a string.

Jon
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