Re: [Caml-list] Subtypes in Ocaml

[Jean-Francois Monin <jeanfrancois.monin@rd.francetelecom.fr>]

> I might wait until i'm a hardcore ocaml hacker, then.
> Might be a while.

Unless you have a special reason to think with subtypes, my advice
would be to change a little your way of seeing things. Basic notions of
Ocaml like sum (now called variant) types are clean, simple and very
good for describing syntactic trees and parsers. See sec 1.4 of the
manual (Records and variants).

A typical example is given in sec 1.7 (Symbolic processing of
expressions). I lost your original message, may be you want something
like:

type expression =
  | Lit of litteral
  | Sum of expression * expression
  | Diff of expression * expression
  | Prod of expression * expression
  | Quot of expression * expression

type litteral =
  | Const of float
  | Var of string

You can convert a litteral l into an expression using Lit(l). 
Conversely, if you have an expression e which shoud come
from a litteral, use pattern matching, e.g. 

let lit_of_exp e = 
  match e with
  | Lit(l) -> l
  | _ -> failwith "expression should come from a litteral"
  end


In some contexts you may also consider:

type expression =
  | Sum of expression * term
  | Diff of expression * term
  | Term of term

and term =
  | Lit of litteral
  | Prod of term * litteral
  | Quot of term * litteral
  | Parentexp of expression

and litteral =
  | Const of float
  | Var of string

  Jean-Francois Monin

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Mark Wotton hons2001 wrote:
 > On Wed, 25 Apr 2001, Chris Hecker wrote:
 > 
 > > 
 > > >Patternmatching seems to do it. if this isn't the right way to do it,
 > > >please, someone let me know before i do something stupid.
 > > 
 > > I'm not 100% sure what you're saying.  My first interpretation of your
 > > question leads me to say "this is what variants and pattern matching
 > > are all about".  Since a variant is a union type, it can be a Literal
 > > and just an expression and pattern matching will let you choose which
 > > to interpret it as.
 > 
 > Yes, that was it.
 > 
 > I had a suspicion it was a dumb question... i'm just not used to using
 > pattern-matching like that. It's working nicely now.
 > 
 > > My second interpretation is that you want to have a function typed to
 > > only take a subset of the variant type.  In this case, you can either
 > > use exceptions (the default pattern match one, or one raised with a |
 > > _ -> failwith "bad type" if you don't want the compiler warnings), 
 > 
 > Yes, I want this too.
 > Pattern matching seems to do it nicely. I was doing without it and
 > wondering why everything was so hard...
 > 
 > > or I think you can do something with polymorphic variants, but I must
 > > admit to being kind of confused by them.
 > 
 > I might wait until i'm a hardcore ocaml hacker, then.
 > Might be a while.
 > 
 > mrak
 > 
 > 
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