A tutorial for the Mercury programming language
a day ago
- #Functional Programming
- #Mercury
- #Logic Programming
- Mercury is a logic-functional programming language, more on the logic side similar to Prolog.
- The tutorial introduces Mercury with a practical example, 'rall', a utility to convert Unix-style newlines to Windows-style.
- Mercury's entry point is a `main/2` predicate with two `io.state` parameters, emphasizing unique and dead instantiatedness.
- Determinism in Mercury is explicitly declared, with categories like `det`, `semidet`, `multi`, `nondet`, `failure`, and `errorneous`.
- The tutorial covers file handling in Mercury, including opening, processing, and closing files with error handling.
- State variables (`!.IO`, `!:IO`) are introduced to manage IO state more conveniently.
- Pattern matching and algebraic data types in Mercury are explained, similar to Haskell or Rust.
- Command line argument handling is demonstrated using `io.command_line_arguments`.
- The 'rall' example demonstrates reading characters from a file, processing them, and writing to another file.