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

• uniqueness

• higher-order programming

  • foldl
  • currying
  • lambda

• maps

• sets

• processing command line options

• modules

  • interface and implementation
  • imports
  • module qualification
  • building multi-module programs (mmc --make, mmc -f)
  • sub modules
  • nested modules
  • mutable variables

• more on types (separate pages for each)

  • abstract types (needs modules to make sense)
  • record syntax
  • univ
  • existentially-quantified types
  • user-defined equality and comparison

• type classes

• exceptions

• purity

• trace goals

• FFI

• concurrency

• debugging

• profiling

• insts

• glossary