[mercury-users] Error detection rate in Mercury vs Other Languages (esp C++ and Python)

[Peter Wang]

On Fri, 2 Dec 2011 16:05:33 -0500, Chris King <colanderman at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> No, read the rest of my e-mail.  That's what I would do if I were
> writing OCaml or Haskell code, and I'd have to resort to monads or
> list comprehensions to make the code maintainable.  I find little
> point to using a logic language if I'm going to go out of my way to
> avoid nondeterminism.
> 
> Now *I'm* "morbidly curious" (which BTW is not a good phrase to use to
> make friends)... why do you bother to use Mercury if you avoid
> nondeterminism and failure?

This is the general agreement among the Mercury developers as well,
at least within the compiler (to use nondeterminism sparingly).

To me, though Mercury doesn't have any one feature that makes it really
stand out, the combination of features is surprisingly rare:
a strong type system, if unambitious[1]; purity; eager evaluation;
"fast" by default; decent syntax; a good foreign language interface.
That's my list anyway.

Peter

[1] a positive when it comes to other people's code
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