Announcing Mercury 0.9.1

We are pleased to announce the release of version 0.9.1 of the Mercury
system.


Mercury 0.9.1 is an update to version 0.9. The 0.9.x series of
releases is intended to be a stable release, based on 0.9 with only
bug fixes applied. More experimental new features will be available
only on the daily development releases.


Mercury is a general-purpose programming language, designed and
implemented by a group of researchers at the University of Melbourne,
Australia. Mercury is based on the paradigm of purely declarative
programming, and was designed to be useful for the development of
large and robust real-world applications. It improves on existing
logic programming languages by providing increased productivity,
reliability and efficiency, and by avoiding the need for non-logical
program constructs. Mercury provides the traditional logic
programming syntax, but also allows the syntactic convenience of
user-defined functions, smoothly integrating logic and functional
programming into a single paradigm.


For more information about Mercury, see the Mercury WWW page at
<http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/mercury/>. For information about where
you can download Mercury 0.9.1, see the end of this message.


The following list contains a brief summary of the major
changes between release 0.8.1 and release 0.9.1. For full details,
see <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/mercury/download/release-0.9.html>
or the NEWS file in the distribution.


Changes in Mercury 0.9.1
------------------------


This release is primarily a bug-fix release.
It fixes some bugs with the binary distribution of 0.9,
stops the compiler accepting some incorrect inst declarations,
fixes a bug in exception handling and a problem with the source
distribution where `configure' did the wrong thing on some architectures
if you ran it twice.


In addition, Morphine has been added to the extras distribution.
Morphine is a trace analysis system, which allows Mercury programs to be
debugged and dynamically analyzed using a Prolog interface. You need
the ECLiPSe Prolog system to use Morphine. See the README file in the
Morphine directory for more details.


Changes in Mercury 0.9
----------------------


Changes to the Mercury language:
* The Mercury type system now supports existentially quantified types.
* We now allow abstract instance declarations.
* We now support a simple form of user-defined infix operators.


Changes to the Mercury standard library:
* Exception handling support is now part of the standard library.
* There are two new standard library modules `time' and `gc'.
* We've added function versions of many of the predicates in the
    Mercury standard library.


New library packages in the Mercury extras distribution:
* We've added support for optional lazy evaluation.
* The extras distribution now includes support for dynamic linking.
* We've added some bindings to POSIX.3 functionality.


Changes to the Mercury implementation:
* Mmake, the Mercury make tool, now includes better support for
    installing libraries.
* The Mercury debugger (mdb) is much improved.
    It now includes support for interactive queries, command-line
    editing and command-line history, display of source line numbers, and
    setting breakpoints on source line numbers.
    The GNU Emacs interface provides a source-linked debugger.
* We've removed the support for using a Prolog debugger on Mercury programs.
* We've added support for user-guided type specialization.
* Numerous bug fixes.


Downloading Mercury
-------------------


The Mercury distribution is available via anonymous ftp or WWW
from the following locations.


We have a new web-site we are trying out, which offers high-speed
downloads (as well as other services we may decide to use in future).
Some of the main files are available here:


Worldwide:
http://sourceforge.net/project/?group_id=1126


The full system and daily snapshot releases are available at out
primary site:


                Australia:
                                ftp://ftp.mercury.cs.mu.oz.au/pub/mercury/


Mirrors:


                Sunsite and mirrors: (source distribution only)
                                ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/Linux/Incoming/
                                ftp://sunsite.unc.edu/pub/linux/devel/lang/mercury/


                USA:
                                ftp://ftp.cs.sunysb.edu/pub/XSB/mercury/


                Sweden:
                                ftp://ftp.csd.uu.se/pub/Mercury/


The home page of the project on the Web is <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/mercury/>.


--
The Mercury Team <http://www.cs.mu.oz.au/mercury/contact/people.html>
Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering
The University of Melbourne, Australia

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