Re: Re : [Caml-list] Warning wished

[Nicolas Pouillard <nicolas.pouillard@gmail.com>]

Excerpts from Julien SIGNOLES's message of Wed Jan 28 15:24:14 +0100 2009:
> Le mercredi 28 janvier 2009 à 14:07 +0000, Matthieu Wipliez a écrit :
> > > Hello,
> > > 
> > > Is it a bug or a well-known feature that the above program does not emit
> > > a warning (because "f x" should have type unit in the body of "g") ?
> > > 
> > > =====
> > > let f x = x
> > > let g x = f x; 1
> > > (* let _ = g 2 *)
> > > ====
> > 
> > I'm not familiar with the internals of the compiler, but what I suppose is happening is that it tries to unify the type of "f x" and "unit", and this succeeds because "f x" has type 'a, which can be unified with anything. The meaning of "a;b" seems to be let _ = a in b rather than let () = a in b.
> > 
> > But like I said, these are suppositions.
> 
> Sure. However in my real case, I had an "ok" code like this :
> 
> let f x : 'a -> unit = ...
> let g x =
>   f x;
>   x
> 
> I changed a little bit the specification of f :
> 
> let f x : 'a -> 'a = ...
> 
> I just expected that caml helps me to find all the instances where I had
> to take care of this specification change. Such a thing is one of the
> very good features of caml. Unfortunatly, in this case, caml did not
> help me while the old implementation of "g" became wrong with the new
> specification of "f" :-(.

That's because (let f x : 'a -> 'a = ...) is not a specification for a
polymorphic function, this is rather an existential quantification than a
universal one.

They are some ugly tricks to ensure a polymorphic function, like this one:

module M : sig
  val f : t -> 'a -> 'a
end = struct
  let f x = ...
end
include M

Best regards,

-- 
Nicolas Pouillard