RE: [Caml-list] Recursive subtyping issue

["David Allsopp" <dra-news@metastack.com>]

Stéphane Glondu wrote:
> Guillaume Yziquel a écrit :
> > Because subtyping seems more efficient than applying a noop function.
> > And this code might run really often, so I do not like very much the
> > idea of having noop functions running really often.
> 
> FWIW, I don't think you have any penalty if you declare your identities
> as externals like Obj.{repr,obj,magic}. Yuk, some might say... but we
> are in the context of bindings to other languages anyway.
> 
> > Moreover, having conversion functions is not really handy, from a
> > syntactic point of view: It's quite convenient to write something like
> >
> > let f : string -> obj :> string -> float t = blah blah blah...
> >
> > than doing the explicit, runtime, casting in the definition of f.
> 
> It's more convenient for me write letters and parentheses than the
> symbol ":>" :-)

Then you can write a camlp4 syntax extension to convert the casts to x_of_y function calls :o)