From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from majordomo@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id BAA00441; Sat, 9 Jun 2001 01:32:27 +0200 (MET DST) X-Authentication-Warning: pauillac.inria.fr: majordomo set sender to owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr using -f 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 BAA15257 for ; Sat, 9 Jun 2001 01:32:22 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from ip208.usw4.rb1.pdx.nwlink.com (ip208.usw4.rb1.pdx.nwlink.com [209.20.133.208]) by nez-perce.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.10.0) with SMTP id f58NWLL27546 for ; Sat, 9 Jun 2001 01:32:21 +0200 (MET DST) Received: (qmail 15702 invoked by uid 500); 8 Jun 2001 23:32:11 -0000 Date: Fri, 8 Jun 2001 16:32:11 -0700 From: leary@nwlink.com To: Hao-yang Wang Cc: caml-list@inria.fr Subject: Re: [Caml-list] Hitchhiker's Guide to Typing Message-ID: <20010608163211.B15375@jean> References: <200106082012.NAA05091@imap.filemaker.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline User-Agent: Mutt/1.2.5i In-Reply-To: <200106082012.NAA05091@imap.filemaker.com>; from hywang@pobox.com on Fri, Jun 08, 2001 at 01:22:05PM -0700 Sender: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Precedence: bulk On Fri, Jun 08, 2001 at 01:22:05PM -0700, Hao-yang Wang wrote: > I think by "type theory" you mean the type systems used in modern > programming languages. Luca Cardelli has written some nice > tutorial/survey on this topic. > > See . Look for the > articles "Typeful programming" and "Type systems". Excellent resources (particularly the "Typeful" doc). My thanks to you. :) Seems to beg the questions tho': Is it not possible to learn and use OCaml without wading through 60 page docs on typing? Will I have to read more of these papers to learn the object system? Modules? I'm willing to read up on typing, since it seems pretty important to getting a good handle on FPLs/OCaml, and that's definitely what I'm after, but I wonder (in advance) if 60 pages can't be turned into far fewer. I'd like some feedback on the notion that "if you can't explain it to a five-year-old, you don't really understand it" (or, rather, haven't given the simplest, most concise, most practically useful explanation). By way of a couple examples, the HHGTTG entry for Earth is "mostly harmless". Investing can be distilled down to "buy low, sell high". Not crashing a motorcycle is a matter of "look where you want to go, don't look at the ground". No discussion of gyroscopic effects and psychology. Of course, a working knowledge of typing will never be so simple, but contrast, for example, the "Type Systems" doc above; Table 34 is a good place to look. This is not what 99.99% of people looking to understand typing in OCaml are going to want. If I didn't have a burning desire to learn OCaml/ML, and someone gave me just this document (and thanks for including the other one!) as a way of explaining the typing lingo, I'd give up and go back to what I was doing before, assuming that OCaml was every bit as obscure, difficult, and unrewarding as Unlambda: http://www.eleves.ens.fr:8080/home/madore/programs/unlambda/ ------------------- Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/ To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr