Mercury is a functional/logical programming language based on Prolog, but more useful for real-world programming.

Mercury is compiled rather than interpreted, as is traditional for logic languagues. It features a sophisticated, strict type and mode system. Its authors claim these features and logic programming's abstract nature speeds writing of reliable programs. Mercury's module system enables division into self-contained units, a problem for past logic programming languages.

Hello World in Mercury:

 :- module hello_world.

 :- interface.

 :- import_module io.

 :- pred main(io__state, io__state).
 :- mode main(di, uo) is det.

 :- implementation.

 main -->
 	io__write_string("Hello, World!\n").

(by Ralph Becket at the University of Melbourne):

Mercury is developed at the University Of Melbourne Computer Science department under the supervision of Dr. Zoltan Somogyi .

Unfortunately, the current Mercury implementation lacks user level documentation (only reference documentation exists). Thus it is almost unused outside the team of its creators.

See also

• functional programming
• logic programming

External links

• Official Mercury Homepage