The Mercury logic programming system

 (github.com)

64 points | by Antibabelic 2 days ago

5 comments

  • 5- 2 hours ago
    prince, a high quality html renderer used for typesetting, is written in mercury:

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

  • ElectroSlayer 8 hours 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.
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    • zeafoamrun 2 hours 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.
  • ororroro 7 hours ago
    There are files in this repository that were last touched 32 years ago. Any reason to be posting it now?
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    • kaonwarb 5 hours ago
      Not that it necessarily applies here, but as a heuristic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
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      • ororroro 5 hours ago
        Interesting point. My understanding of Mercury is that it is hard carried by Zoltan so it has a bus factor of 1.
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        • zeafoamrun 2 hours ago
          I always understood it was a teaching language for students who wanted to get programming language implementation experience.
    • epgui 7 hours ago
      Why is that relevant or noteworthy? There are files that were updated recently too.
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      • ororroro 6 hours 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.
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        • hackyhacky 6 hours 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?
    • zeafoamrun 2 hours ago
      Damn dude you're making me feel old
  • thechao 7 hours ago
    The closest that I could find to a "what the fuck is this?" page is:

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

  • KnuthIsGod 5 hours 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.

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    • jamwise 5 hours ago
      But the repo has had fairly consistent commits since then. Not huge activity, but not sure I'd call it dead.
    • kryptiskt 3 hours ago
      Last commit was 2 minutes ago. Seems like a better measure than releases, different projects have different release cadences.