David Overton on The Mercury Programming Language

​Melbourne Compose is the monthly in-person meetup for functional programmers in Melbourne, every 3rd Thursday of the month in Carlton.

Our November session will be held 5:30-8pm Nov 20th at our regular venue, Activity Room 2 at Kathleen Syme Center in Carlton. Arrive from 5:30 for chat and socialising, talks start around 6:30. (Final meeting for 2025.)

Please RSVP via Luma: https://luma.com/nqg5ckh3

David Overton will be presenting this month, on AFAIK the only programming language that originated here in Melbourne:

The Mercury Programming Language - Logic Programming for the Real World

​Mercury is a purely declarative logic programming language that combines the expressive power of Prolog with the strong static typing, purity, and performance guarantees of languages like Haskell.

​It was developed at the University of Melbourne over several decades starting in the mid 1990s.

​Designed for reliability and efficiency, Mercury introduced a sophisticated mode and determinism system that lets the compiler reason about dataflow and optimize away unnecessary backtracking, producing high-performance native code. 

​This talk will introduce Mercury’s core ideas, syntax, and type system, illustrate how it differs from both Haskell and Prolog, and demonstrate how its design was geared towards producing a useful declarative language for "real world" software engineering.

​Attendees should come away with an understanding of Mercury's place in the programming landscape, and some appreciation of the goals the project was trying to achieve.

​As always, newcomers welcome. Reach Ben on 407 990094 if you have trouble accessing the venue.

Hope to see you there :)
-Ben Hutchison & John Walker