Re: [Caml-list] Strange syntax behavior

[skaller <skaller@users.sourceforge.net>]

On Wed, 2004-06-02 at 03:13, John Goerzen wrote:

> Is this a bug or a feature?  If a feature, why is this so?  the
> try..with behavior seems highly misleading.

This is a consequence of a lot of the syntactic elements
being prefix form, that is, having no trailing terminator:
if/then/else and try/with and let/in and match/with
are all like this, whilst while/do/done and for/do/done 
are terminated.

Prefix forms have to have a definite precedence.
No choice is always what you want.

Felix uses closed constructions mainly so you have to write:
if/then/else/endif and match .. endmatch etc.
[Except i had to allow let/in .. :]

Whilst this is more obvious than the Ocaml syntax,
it does make heavily nested expressions more verbose.

Summary: a fairly arbitrary choice. Use begin/end
around try/with if in doubt. You will get used to it.
However it is a bit of an obstacle to learning Ocaml:
after, what, 8 years Ocaml programming I still have
no idea what the precedences of everything are.

And I have no idea how to read C type declarations
after 20+ years .. I just use typedefs .. it was 
interesting to write a parser/emitter for them
recently, I actually almost learned the C rules..

-- 
John Skaller, mailto:skaller@users.sf.net
voice: 061-2-9660-0850, 
snail: PO BOX 401 Glebe NSW 2037 Australia
Checkout the Felix programming language http://felix.sf.net



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