Re: [Caml-list] Today's inflamatory opinion: exceptions are bad

[Olivier Andrieu <oandrieu@nerim.net>]

 Chris King [Saturday 9 December 2006] :
 >
 > On 12/9/06, Brian Hurt <bhurt@spnz.org> wrote:
 > > The second reason is that match ... with doesn't break tail recursion,
 > > while try ... with does.  This code is not tail recursive:
 > >
 > > let rec echo_file channel =
 > >        try
 > >                begin
 > >                        let line = input_line channel in
 > >                        print_string (line ^ "\n");
 > >                        echo_file channel
 > >                end
 > >        with
 > >                | End_of_file -> ()
 > > ;;
 > 
 > I'm a big fan of Martin Jambon's "let try" syntax extension [1].  With
 > it the above construct can be written as:
 > 
 > let rec echo_file channel =
 >     let try line = input_line channel in
 >     print_string (line ^ "\n");
 >     echo_file channel
 >     with End_of_file -> ()
 > 
 > and would be tail-recursive.  More often than not this is how I want
 > to write my exception handlers.

I have a syntax extension with a somehow similar syntax, this example
would written like that:
,----
| let rec echo_file channel =
|   catch input_line channel with 
|   | exception End_of_file ->
|       ()
|   | val line ->
|       print_string (line ^ "\n") ;
|       echo_file channel
`----
the tail-recursion is a bit more apparent this way.

-- 
   Olivier