[m-users.] Functions vs Predicates?

[Qqwy/Wiebe-Marten]

Dear members of the Mercury users mailing list,

I am a programmer with quite a bit of background in Haskell and
Elixir/Erlang (as well as some other languages) and some beginner
experience in Prolog.

As I like statically-typed languages very much, I was excited to
discover Mercury and have now read through the various beginner
tutorials and a big part of the users guide and language reference.


There is one thing that is puzzling me, however: Mercury has both
`pred`icates and `func`tions.
At first I thought that `func`s were "syntactic sugar" around a
predicate which always flows in a single direction
(which therefore would need less manual type annotations as the compiler
does not need to infer as much).

However, later on I read that `func`s can also be used backward.
This puzzles me, because now I am confused as to when I should use a
`pred` and when a `func` in my own code.
What confuses me further is that there are e.g. functions like
`univ_to_term` and `term_to_univ`
which seem like perfect candidates to have been written as a single
reversible `term_univ(Term, Univ)` predicate instead.

When is it more idiomatic to use a function, and when to use a predicate?


Thank you,


~Marten / Qqwy


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