[m-users.] Mercury Crash Course

[Mark Brown]

Hi Julian,

On Sat, Aug 3, 2019 at 11:14 AM Julian Fondren <jfondren at minimaltype.com> wrote:
>
> Hello list,
>
> I've posted a Mercury tutorial here:
>
> https://mercury-in.space/crash.html

That looks great! Thanks for putting in the effort, I hope plenty of
people benefit from this.

>
> If a good Mercury reference manual teaches you everything you need
> to know about a narrow slice of the language when you open that
> slice's chapter, and if a good Mercury tutorial teaches you
> everything you need to know about a tiny subset of the language in
> chapter N, and then a slightly larger subset in chapter N+1, and so
> on, then I hope a good Mercury crash course is one that takes the
> whole language and throws it in the reader's face.
>
> My thought was that tutorial subsets of Mercury don't show off
> the language very well, and more importantly that you need to have
> at least a working understanding of most of the language to write
> anything with it without running into really confusing error
> messages.
>
> Maybe I've only written a bad tutorial :/

Obviously, I'm not in your target audience so I can't make a direct
judgement. But I'm sure there is no "one size fits all" tutorial, so I
find it easy to believe that one programmer's bad tutorial is another
programmer's excellent crash course :-)

>
> There are some coverage gaps that I may eventually close:
>
> - DCG syntax

You can probably skip those, as they have been all but superseded by
state variables.

Mark