[m-users.] Outdated elisp function "string-to-int" in lib/mercury/elisp/gud.el in the ROTD distribution

[Volker Wysk]

Am Samstag, dem 17.10.2026 um 14:38 +1100 schrieb Zoltan Somogyi:
> 
> 
> On Thu, 15 Oct 2026 18:12:20 +0200, Volker Wysk <post at volker-wysk.de>
> wrote:
> > Am Freitag, dem 16.10.2026 um 02:58 +1100 schrieb Zoltan Somogyi:
> > > On Thu, 15 Oct 2026 17:52:39 +0200, Volker Wysk <post at volker-wysk.de>
> > > wrote:
> > > > I'm wondering why I don't get any reply.
> > > 
> > > Because none of the current Mercury developers use Emacs,
> > 
> > That's a surprise. May I ask which editor(s) is/are being used, with
> > Mercury
> > support, I suppose? Maybe I would like to switch, too.
> 
> I use vim, and I believe Julien and Peter do as well.
> 
> (When I started, Emacs was not an option. It existed, but its nickname,
> Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping, was well earned, and this is
> not a recommedation when one is using a machine that has (a) only four
> megabytes of memory, and (b) is used by not one person, but about 100.
> I actually started with ed, then switched to ex, and then vi, as the
> available
> CPU horsepower allowed.)

What "emacs" *really* means: Escape-Meta-Alt-Control-Shift.  :-))


> A couple of months ago I installed Ubuntu 26.04 on my laptop, replacing
> 24.04. I found that 26.04 came with a mercury.vim file that had
> significant
> support for Mercury, specifically support for indicating the lines that
> had errors.
> I spent a couple of hours first finding this out, and then finding a way
> to turn
> it off. I did this because it was the wrong kind of support: it interfered
> with
> my preferred workflow. So just because something has MORE support
> for something, does not mean it has BETTER support. However, people's
> mileage will definitely vary.

There's no "mercury.vim" file in the Ubuntu 26.04 distribution. But there
are three different ones of them in the Mercury git repository and the rotd
distribution under "vim/".

I've found the "IDE and editor support" section on
https://mercurylang.org/development.html. It lists Vim, Eclipse, NetBeans
and Atom. It lists Flycheck for Emacs, but omits the Metal Mercury Mode for
Emacs and the Emacs-Mercury debugger integration. An AI query for editors
with Mercury support yields the same ones.

I'm looking for a more modern editor or IDE. Such as Kate from the KDE
project. Unfortunately it has no Mercury support. But maybe it would be easy
to begin with the Prolog support and build Mercury support from it. And I
should take a look at Eclipse, NetBeans and Atom... I'll query that AI for
more info on features and differences.

Cheers,
Volker