[m-users.] Mercury operators explained

[Julien Fischer]

On Wed, Feb 19, 2014 at 9:30 AM, Zoltan Somogyi
<zoltan.somogyi at runbox.com>wrote:

>
> There is no =\= operator in Mercury, because there is no need for one.
>
> In Prolog, the unification operator = operates on unevaluated terms. If
> you give it two
> arithmetic expressions, it will tell you whether they have the same
> structure, but not
> whether they evaluate to the same result. Arithmetic expressions are
> evaluated only
> in special contexts, such as the operands of =\= or the right hand side of
> the "is" operator.
>
> In Mercury, function calls (such as calls to the arithmetic functions) are
> evaluated wherever
> they happen to be. So in Mercury, you use the usual equality operator =
> where in Prolog
> you would use =\=.
>
> Note that Mercury is NOT a Prolog dialect. Semantically, it is
> significantly different from
> Prolog in several respects; this is one. Attempts to transliterate
> nontrivial Prolog programs
> into Mercury won't work if the person doing the transliterating doesn't
> know the differences.
>
> As for the list of operators in the Mercury language reference manual,
> some are built-in
> constructs of the language, and are explained in the relevant section of
> that manual,
> and some represent functions in the Mercury standard library, and are
> documented
> in the library's reference manual.
>

It's worth pointing out here that the standard library does include a
prolog module,
that is intended to assist with porting Prolog programs to Mercury.  It
does define the
=\= operator appropriately for Mercury (i.e. it's just a synonym for '=').

See: <
http://www.mercurylang.org/information/doc-latest/mercury_library/prolog.html#prolog
>
for further details.

Cheers,
Julien.
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