Mercury, an Eecient Purely Declarative Logic Programming Language

We introduce Mercury, a new purely declarative logic programming language designed to provide the support that groups of application programmers need when building large programs. Mercury's strong type, mode and determinism systems improve program reliability by catching many errors at compile time. We present a new and relatively simple execution model that takes advantage of the information these systems provide to generate very eecient code. We are developing a prototype compiler which uses this execution model to generate portable C code. Our benchmarks show that the code generated by our experimental implementation is signiicantly faster than the code generated by mature optimizing implementations of other logic programming languages.