[mercury-users] Error detection rate in Mercury vs Other Languages (esp C++ and Python)

[Paul Bone]

On Fri, Dec 02, 2011 at 04:05:33PM -0500, Chris King wrote:
> Now *I'm* "morbidly curious" (which BTW is not a good phrase to use to
> make friends)... why do you bother to use Mercury if you avoid
> nondeterminism and failure?
> 

Since the anwser(s) for this question are subjective I thought I'd add my 2c.

I also avoid nondeterminism and failure.  Mercury has a desireable conbination
of features:  purity, strong typechecking, switch completeness checking (a
subset of determinism checking) and eager evaluation.

The tools of Mercury are also very compelling, in particular the declarative
debugger and the deep profiler.

In particular the deep profiler is very helpful for my work on
auto-parallelization.  Therefore, this and eager evaluation make Mercury the
most desirable platform for auto-parallelization work.

I dislike the syntax, especially wrt pred, mode and instantiation state
declrations.  But improving on this would mean changing the syntax drastically
and I don't have a better solution.


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