The Mercury logic programming system(github.com)
94 pointsby Antibabelic5 days ago6 comments
  • mattgoupil3 days ago
    Something you might find interesting to look at is Rego, a datalog-derived language been used for writing security policies. Rego is dynamically typed, so no real protection. It's input is basically JSON and it can apply JSON-Schema, but that's it. I think it would be interesting to look at Rego as a restricted version of this and see what types buys for a Rego user. It's probably one of the larger areas of logic programming and has brought people into the fold, so to speak.
  • ElectroSlayer3 days ago
    Oh wow, Zoltan was one of my lecturers at UniMelb, and in one semester we were tasked with learning his Mercury language. So good to see it thriving still.
    • zeafoamrun3 days ago
      I TA-ed for Zoltan's 2nd year "learning how to use bash/gdb/etc" class and it was a lot of fun. I hope they're still teaching that class.
      • angry_octet3 days ago
        It was called "433-252 Software Engineering Principles & Tools" until ~2008 I think (433-244 before that) but then it seems to have been reorganised. Tbh, Unimelb Comp Sci is a shadow of it's former self, a victim of the 'Melbourne Model' common core sausage factory concept.
        • ofrzeta3 days ago
          Is it the same model as the "Bologna process" in Europe, which is kind of funny because "Bologna" also refers to a type of sausage in the US of A.
    • angry_octet3 days ago
      I hope he's stopped drinking Fanta.
  • 5-3 days ago
    prince, a high quality html renderer used for typesetting, is written in mercury:

    https://www.princexml.com/doc/acknowledgements/

    • srean3 days ago
      Was it written in Prolog at any point in time ?

      Perhaps I am misremembering, but my brain is telling me of a CSS or PDF parser written in Prolog.

  • thechao3 days ago
    The closest that I could find to a "what the fuck is this?" page is:

    https://www.mercurylang.org/about.html

  • ororroro3 days ago
    There are files in this repository that were last touched 32 years ago. Any reason to be posting it now?
    • kaonwarb3 days ago
      Not that it necessarily applies here, but as a heuristic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
      • ororroro3 days ago
        Interesting point. My understanding of Mercury is that it is hard carried by Zoltan so it has a bus factor of 1.
        • zeafoamrun3 days ago
          I always understood it was a teaching language for students who wanted to get programming language implementation experience.
    • epgui3 days ago
      Why is that relevant or noteworthy? There are files that were updated recently too.
      • ororroro3 days ago
        Why the aggression? This language while cool has existed for decades and never taken off. I just wanted a reason to believe it relevant so I could have an excuse to take another look.
        • hackyhacky3 days ago
          Why do you think "oldest untouched file" is a good metric for relevance? Do you know what is the oldest untouched file in gcc or Python?
        • srean3 days ago
          "Taking off" is an unreliable metric of capability and fitness to a problem you may want solved.
        • epgui3 days ago
          There was no aggression.
    • zeafoamrun3 days ago
      Damn dude you're making me feel old
  • KnuthIsGod3 days ago
    Last release was in 2023.

    It is effectively dead.

    This is a terrible shame, because this would have been an nice modern alternative to Prolog.

    • kryptiskt3 days ago
      Last commit was 2 minutes ago. Seems like a better measure than releases, different projects have different release cadences.
    • jamwise3 days ago
      But the repo has had fairly consistent commits since then. Not huge activity, but not sure I'd call it dead.
    • wduquette3 days ago
      You say “dead”, I say “stable”. Not everyone wants to base their work on a moving target.