Mercury (programming language)

Mercury is a functional logic programming language made for real-world uses. The first version was developed at the University of Melbourne, Computer Science department, by Fergus Henderson, Thomas Conway, and Zoltan Somogyi, under Somogyi's supervision, and released on April 8, 1995. Mercury is a purely declarative logic programming language. It is related to both Prolog and Haskell. It features a strong, static, polymorphic type system, and a strong mode and determinism system. The official implementation, the Melbourne Mercury Compiler, is available for most Unix and Unix-like platforms, including Linux, macOS, and for Windows. Mercury is based on the logic programming language Prolog. It has the same syntax and the same basic concepts such as the selective linear definite clause resolution (SLD) algorithm. It can be viewed as a pure subset of Prolog with strong types and modes. As such, it is often compared to its predecessor in features and run-time efficiency. The language is designed using software engineering principles. Unlike the original implementations of Prolog, it has a separate compilation phase, rather than being directly interpreted. This allows a much wider range of errors to be detected before running a program. It features a strict static type and mode system and a module system. By using information obtained at compile time (such as type and mode), programs written in Mercury typically perform significantly faster than equivalent programs written in Prolog. Its authors claim that Mercury is the fastest logic language in the world, by a wide margin. Mercury is a purely declarative language, unlike Prolog, since it lacks extra-logical Prolog statements such as ! (cut) and imperative input/output (I/O). This enables advanced static program analysis and program optimization, including compile-time garbage collection, but it can make certain programming constructs (such as a switch over a number of options, with a default) harder to express. While Mercury does allow impure functionality, it serves mainly as a way to call foreign language code.

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