Determinism analysis in the Mercury compiler

Mercury is a new purely declarative logic programming language. The Mercury determinism system allows programmers to specify which predicates never fail and which predicates succeed at most once. This information allows the compiler to check the program for errors, pinpointing predicates that do not satisfy their declarations. This makes programmers signiicantly more productive and enhances the reliability of their programs. The Mercury compiler also uses determinism information to generate much faster code than any other logic programming system. This paper presents the algorithms used by the Mercury compiler to infer determinism information.