Tutorial

Here is a rough outline for a tutorial that I think we could write together on the wiki. Feel free to rearrange into an order makes more sense to you, add new suggestions, or write a page yourself. You don't have to be a Mercury developer! It's a tutorial, it doesn't need to be rigorous. It's a wiki, the writing doesn't need to be high quality.

The expected audience is someone with some or a lot of programming experience, possibly in functional programming languages, probably not proficient in Prolog.

• Hello, World!

  • basic program structure
  • compiling and running
  • brief introduction to state variables

• Factorial

  • function syntax
  • variables
  • if-then-else
  • recursion
  • builtin ints, integer arithmetic

• Comments

• Terms and variables

• Builtin types

  • int, float, string, char
  • tuples
  • state-of-the-world
  • type conversion

• Discriminated unions

• Equivalence types

• Predicates and functions

• Basic goals

  • conjunction, disjunction, negation, true, fail, etc.

• unification algorithm

• Lists

• input and output

  • something about purity
  • formatted output
  • example: read from standard input
  • example: reversing words per line
  • example: reading/writing files
  • example: data terms

• RPN calculator

• Zebra puzzle

• Insts

• Higher-order programming

• uniqueness

• Maps

• sets

• processing command line options

• Modules

• Abstract types

• Existential types

• Type classes

• record syntax

• user-defined equality and comparison

• Committed choice nondeterminism

• exceptions

• mutable variables

• purity

• trace goals

• FFI

• concurrency

• debugging

• profiling

• glossary