Mercury 0.4

Appeared in Volume 8/4, November 1995

Mercury is a purely declarative LP language. Like Prolog and other existing LP languages, it is a very high-level language that allows programmers to concentrate on the problem rather than the low-level details such as memory management.

Unlike Prolog, which is oriented towards exploratory programming, Mercury is designed for the construction of large, reliable, efficient software systems by teams of programmers.

Some of new parts of this release:

• higher-order predicates and lambda expressions
• unique modes are partially implemented
• partially instantiated modes are closer to being fully implemented
• 'msc' and 'mnc' produce smaller object files
• DEC Alpha/OSF and BSDI BSD/386 ports
• the efficiency of the 386 port has been improved by about 70%
• a profiler
• new and improved library predicates

Australia:
ftp://ftp.cs.mu.oz.au/pub/mercury
ftp://turiel.cs.mu.oz.au/pub/mercury
http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~fjh/mercury

USA:
ftp://ftp.cs.sunysb.edu/pub/XSB/mercury

Europe:
ftp://ftp.csd.uu.se/pub/Mercury

The home page of the project is:

http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/~zs/mercury.html

For more information, contact one of:

Fergus Henderson, Thomas Conway, Zoltan Somogyi
Dept. of Computer Science
Univ. of Melbourne, Australia
Email: fjh@cs.mu.oz.au,
       conway@cs.mu.oz.au,
       zs@cs.mu.oz.au