From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Thread: 103376,1c8c283347cf0236 X-Google-NewGroupId: yes X-Google-Attributes: gida07f3367d7,domainid0,public,usenet X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit Path: g2news1.google.com!news3.google.com!news2.google.com!Xl.tags.giganews.com!border1.nntp.dca.giganews.com!nntp.giganews.com!local2.nntp.dca.giganews.com!news.giganews.com.POSTED!not-for-mail NNTP-Posting-Date: Fri, 22 Apr 2011 21:27:05 -0500 From: Peter C. Chapin Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: If not Ada, what else... Date: Fri, 22 Apr 2011 22:26:52 -0400 Organization: Vermont Technical College Message-ID: References: <87r58vmmo0.fsf@mid.deneb.enyo.de> <874o5q55ke.fsf@mid.deneb.enyo.de> X-Newsreader: Forte Agent 6.00/32.1186 trialware MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Usenet-Provider: http://www.giganews.com X-Trace: sv3-1FEV4TMDcvF5NUvt5d3vWWZ+HJm87+jD2uK4Gq7bPY53nG2ac6tW6Opl23QyqS21nwT8sxBmvRHw9RV!bY26D2KRNdFQb6TRrunRRIoB/ECbtvi6uw0QEfWeeEDTfKyPKsmXoljt1Le3iJax0tq8rqE= X-Complaints-To: abuse@giganews.com X-DMCA-Notifications: http://www.giganews.com/info/dmca.html X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Please be sure to forward a copy of ALL headers X-Abuse-and-DMCA-Info: Otherwise we will be unable to process your complaint properly X-Postfilter: 1.3.40 X-Original-Bytes: 2347 Xref: g2news1.google.com comp.lang.ada:18999 Date: 2011-04-22T22:26:52-04:00 List-Id: On Fri, 22 Apr 2011 23:39:29 +0200, Florian Weimer wrote: >I know that it's closer to Prolog, but it's so far away from Ada that >at this point, the distinction does not matter anymore. I also have an interest in Mercury but I haven't had the time to study it much yet. The language is very different than Ada... which is good. I've heard it said (maybe in this newsgroup) that a programming language isn't worth learning unless it changes the way you think about programming. If you've never used a logic language before, learning Mercury will probably have that effect. However, unlike Prolog, Mercury does a lot more analysis statically (and consequently it has much high execution efficiency). My understanding is that one of its goals is to be a logic language suitable for software engineering. On the other hand Mercury is very much a niche language. Is it even out of the research stage yet? Languages like Erlang, Scala, and F# (to name three) bring functional programming to the table and are also being used in at least some commercial ventures. Peter