[m-users.] users Digest, Vol 125, Issue 2

[Ted Stock]

Hi Tomas,

Feel free to reach out to me directly if you’d prefer not to fill the list with AI discussion, but here are a few notes from my experience.

I used Claude to build a Python-style regular expression module with a C PCRE2 backend. I was pleasantly surprised by Claude’s clauses (sorry). The whole process took about three hours, including some light testing. Claude did wander down a few blind alleys and needed occasional redirection, but given my rusty C skills, it still saved me close to a week of work. For those interested, the (currently unpolished) repository is here: https://github.com/testock/mercury-re

A few tips:

1. When working with Claude and Mercury, make sure it has access to the compiler source. This lets you point it to relevant examples it can use to model its output.

2. Claude doesn’t always interpret compiler errors correctly, so you’ll need to keep an eye out for cases where it gets “confused.”

Overall, I found Claude quite helpful for the more tedious parts of writing Mercury-C wrappers, though I haven’t used it for more substantial Mercury development. I suspect AI assistants will prove particularly effective for Hindley-Milner languages like Mercury, where strong typing and compiler guarantees reduce the need for extensive code review. My use case doesn’t benefit from that as much, since interfacing with C is inherently less type-safe.

Best regards,
Ted



> On Oct 26, 2025, at 02:00, users-request at lists.mercurylang.org wrote:
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>   1. (cough) "AI" (Tomas By)
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> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
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> Message: 1
> Date: Sat, 25 Oct 2025 22:31:47 +0200
> From: Tomas By <tomas at basun.net>
> To: Mercury Users <users at lists.mercurylang.org>
> Subject: [m-users.] (cough) "AI"
> Message-ID: <878qgy4tak.wl-tomas at basun.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII
> 
> Hi all,
> 
> Just read this on Slashdot:
> 
> | I'm a programmer who started out hesitant about AI, and at first I
> | thought all that it could do was auto-complete better.
> | Then I tried Claude Code, and it really is like having your own
> | personal junior dev assisting you're every need. Like a junior, it
> | makes mistakes, but using the *massive* amount of good code that it
> | creates, and fixing what's left, is so much faster than writing it
> | all from scratch yourself.
> https://slashdot.org/story/25/10/25/0324244/meet-the-people-who-dare-to-say-no-to-ai
> 
> and wonder if anybody has tried this with Mercury?
> 
> I suspect that (1) this person uses C[*]/Java, and (2) the usefulness
> of this "AI" stuff for Mercury will be proportionally less in a
> similar magnitude as code length for same functionality, ie a factor
> ten or so.
> 
> Anybody has any experiences?
> 
> /Tomas
> 
> 
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