[mercury-users] Mercury in academic teaching?

[Nicholas Nethercote]

On Tue, 10 Oct 2006, Peter Schachte wrote:

>> On Mon, 9 Oct 2006, Jonathan Morgan wrote:
>>> Think like a computer scientist - so long as we get the same
>>> asymptotic efficiency, who cares about these minor constant factor
>>> differences?
>>
>> Almost everybody who isn't just coding for a class.
>
> The point I was making was that the difference between min/3 returning
> the same value twice when the numbers are equal, returning it only
> once but still leaving a choicepoint, and having code that Mercury
> would classify as 'det', is only one of efficiency, not correctness.
> This distinction should be discussed much later in a subject on logic
> programming, but would be difficult to delay in a subject using
> Mercury.  If --infer-modes works well enough, that might be the
> answer, but I'd have to use it pretty extensively before I was
> confident it wouldn't give error messages that would create more
> confusion than it avoided.

Sure.  I wasn't disagreeing with your comment, I was disagreeing with 
Jonathan's comment.

Nick
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