From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from weis@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id TAA12516 for caml-red; Tue, 10 Oct 2000 19:02:25 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from nez-perce.inria.fr (nez-perce.inria.fr [192.93.2.78]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id OAA07578 for ; Tue, 10 Oct 2000 14:49:47 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from heplix4.ikp.physik.tu-darmstadt.de (heplix4.ikp.physik.tu-darmstadt.de [130.83.24.139]) by nez-perce.inria.fr (8.10.0/8.10.0) with ESMTP id e9ACnlH04569 for ; Tue, 10 Oct 2000 14:49:47 +0200 (MET DST) Received: (from ohl@localhost) by heplix4.ikp.physik.tu-darmstadt.de (8.9.3/8.9.3) id OAA06373; Tue, 10 Oct 2000 14:47:30 +0200 X-Authentication-Warning: heplix4.ikp.physik.tu-darmstadt.de: ohl set sender to ohl@heplix4.ikp.physik.tu-darmstadt.de using -f From: Thorsten Ohl Message-ID: <14819.4066.697232.891781@heplix4.ikp.physik.tu-darmstadt.de> Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2000 14:47:30 +0200 (CEST) To: caml-list@inria.fr Subject: Re: Undefined evaluation order In-Reply-To: References: X-Mailer: VM 6.74 under Emacs 20.3.1 Reply-To: ohl@hep.tu-darmstadt.de Sender: weis@pauillac.inria.fr Brian Rogoff writes: > For OCaml it appears that the perspective adopted is that the > programmer must make the temporal dependencies explicit. [...] it is > mentioned that this usually leads to clearer programs. I'm sure the > bytecode compiler argument is valid, but not the code clarity one Maybe I have ben brainwashed by too much Fortran, but depending on side effects in the evaluation of function arguments that change the result according to the evaluation order is not good style, IMHO. Explicit `let' bindings are clear and improve the likelihood that the author will still be able to understand his/her code a few year later significantly. I agree that leaving this important chunk of the semantics unspecified is not nice, but closing the door on parallelism forever would be much worse, IMHO. (Only half-joking) There should be an option in the compiler randomizing evaluation order for debugging ... -- Thorsten Ohl, Physics Department, TU Darmstadt -- ohl@hep.tu-darmstadt.de http://heplix.ikp.physik.tu-darmstadt.de/~ohl/ [<=== PGP public key here]