[m-users.] Using insts to simulate dependent-type features.

[Zoltan Somogyi]

On Fri, 19 Jul 2019 19:02:34 -0500, Julian Fondren <jfondren at minimaltype.com> wrote:
> It's interesting that Mercury's libraries are not as clever as Mercury
> allows. I noticed that first with typeclasses, which are omnipresent in
> some other languages but which only even appear in nine of Mercury's
> library modules.

In languages like Haskell, you need to use typeclasses Eq, Ord, Show and Read
for a lot of tasks. In Mercury, equality, comparison, reading in and writing out
are defined on all types. That cuts down the number of *explicit* mentions
of typeclasses a lot.

> Relatedly (to the supermarket analogy), how up to date are these pages?
> 
> https://mercurylang.org/development/developers/todo.html
> 
> https://mercurylang.org/development/developers/work_in_progress.html

They are very out of date. We should consider removing them.

Zoltan.