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@setfilename mercury_library.info
@settitle The Mercury Library Reference Manual

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@c @dircategory The Mercury Programming Language
@c @direntry
@c * Mercury Library: (mercury_library).  The Mercury Library Reference Manual.
@c @end direntry

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This file documents the Mercury standard library, version <VERSION>.

Copyright (C) 1995-1999 The University of Melbourne.

Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of
this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice
are preserved on all copies.

@ignore
Permission is granted to process this file through Tex and print the
results, provided the printed document carries copying permission
notice identical to this one except for the removal of this paragraph
(this paragraph not being relevant to the printed manual).

@end ignore
Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this
manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided also that
the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a
permission notice identical to this one.

Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this manual
into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions.
@end ifinfo

@titlepage
@title The Mercury Library Reference Manual
@subtitle Version <VERSION>
@c @author Fergus Henderson
@c @author Thomas Conway
@c @author Zoltan Somogyi
@page
@vskip 0pt plus 1filll
Copyright @copyright{} 1995-1997 The University of Melbourne.

Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of
this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice
are preserved on all copies.

Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this
manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided also that
the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a
permission notice identical to this one.

Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this manual
into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions.
@end titlepage
@contents
@page
@c ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

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@node Top,,, (mercury)
@top Mercury Library Reference Manual, version <VERSION>
@end ifinfo

The Mercury standard library contains a variety of modules which we
hope may be of general usefulness.  If you write a module that would
be useful to others, and you would like us to include it as part of
the Mercury standard library, please let us know.

The following documentation is simply the interface parts to those
modules, automatically extracted from the source code.  Some of the
library modules are not very well documented; we apologize.

For many of the modules in the standard library, we have not
yet had enough experience using them to be confident that the
current interface is satisfactory; it is likely that the interfaces to
many of the modules in the standard library will change somewhat in
future releases of the Mercury system.  Some modules are rather
experimental modules that may even be removed in future releases.
Of course, we wouldn't make changes gratuitously, but at the
current time, preserving 100% backwards compatibility would
be disadvantageous in the long run.

To help you protect yourself from depending on modules that are likely
to change, each module has a comment ``stability: low/medium/high'' at
the top which gives an indication of the likely stability of the
interface to that module.  For modules whose stability is ``high'', new
functionality may be added to the interface, but we envisage very few
if any changes to the interface of the sort that might break existing
code.  For modules whose stability is ``medium'', we expect that
changes are more likely.  For modules whose stability is ``low'', such
changes are highly likely.  If you want to minimize the possibility of
your programs requiring modification to work with new releases of the
Mercury system, we recommend that if possible you use only those
modules whose stability is described as either ``medium to high'' or
``high''.

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