[Haskell-cafe] Re: Interesting feature

[Benjamin L.Russell]

On Tue, 8 Jul 2008 16:59:00 +1000, "David Overton"
<david at overtons.id.au> wrote:

>On 08/07/2008, Benjamin L. Russell <DekuDekuplex at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>  If you are interested in logic programming in a language with some
>>  similarity to Haskell, you might also wish to investigate the strongly
>>  typed logic programming language Godel (see
>>  http://www.cs.bris.ac.uk/~bowers/goedel.html).  When I first saw an
>>  example of the code, I was surprised that, unlike Prolog, the language
>>  was strongly typed, and supported modules, and (albeit very loosely)
>>  resembled Haskell, except that it was a logic programming language.
>
>While we're plugging logic programming languages, you might also be interested
>in Mercury (http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/research/mercury/).  This is a
>logic/functional language with Prolog-like syntax, but with a Haskell-like
>type system, including Hindley-Milner types and type classes.
>IMHO Mercury is even closer to Haskell than Goedel.

Yes, Mercury appears interesting, but I was also wondering whether
there were any logic programming languages with strong typing and
modules that have GUI-based REPL's, similar to WinHugs, available. For
example, both SWI-Prolog and GNU Prolog have GUI-based REPL's of that
type, but Mercury, at least from what I read in the on-line
documentation, does not appear to have one.  Go"del has SAGE (Self
Applicable Go"del Evaluator) (download goedel-sage.tar.Z (200KB) at
ftp://ftp.cs.bris.ac.uk/pub/goedel/latest/goedel-sage.tar.Z), but
Go"del is not available for Windows, and according to the home page,
there are no plans for this to change in the future.

The advantage of a GUI-based REPL is that it facilitates learning the
language for beginners and non-*NIX/Linux users, and, in some cases,
using the language in a non-*NIX/Linux environment.  For example,
although I can use Mac OS X at home, my work computer, on which I
study programming during lunch and after work, uses Windows XP
Professional.  It is clumsy switching to Cygwin and Emacs in a Windows
environment, because I cannot use UNIX-style tools in the same way
outside of Cygwin in Windows as in UNIX.  In addition, many
directories have spaces in their paths, and many UNIX tools do not
support spaces in paths to files.  In this environment, a GUI-based
REPL would be convenient.

Do you know of any logic programming languages with strong typing and
modules that have GUI-based REPL's, similar to WinHugs, available?

-- Benjamin L. Russell

>Also, see my recent attempts at (constraint) logic programming in Haskell:
>http://overtond.blogspot.com/2008/07/pre.html
>http://overtond.blogspot.com/2008/07/haskell-sudoku-solver-using-finite.html
>
>David