Re: [Caml-list] Camlp4/OCaml [was: Generating C stubs]

[Pierre Weis <pierre.weis@inria.fr>]

> FAIW, let me say I'm shedding blood to make my code compile 
> when I raise exceptions that have non banal type lists: I 
> always misplace my parentheses.

Have you ever read the programming guidelines that explain the
``secrets'' of Caml parentheses ?

http://pauillac.inria.fr/caml/FAQ/pgl-eng.html

Section IV: When to use parentheses within an expression

If you learn the rules, if you follow those guidelines, and still
experience problems, please let me know, since I used those simple
principles for years with thousands of students (I really mean several
thousands students not several students) and they had no problems once
they had understood and learned those rules.

On the other hand, I agree with you that if you don't know the rules
for parens in Caml, you certainly should have problems to write your
programs. This is the same problems as the one of young people at
school that use to claim that mathematics _HAVE_ (*) syntactic
problems because they never know where to put parens in

1 + 2 * 3

As a teacher, I always said that probably _THEY_ (*) have to learn the
rules first, then use them properly, and then they could criticize the
notations and at the end they will probably could have authority to
claim that mathematics have problems. Fortunately, none of them ever
reached this final step! However, they could have been right in the
first place, and mathematical notation could have to be revisited; for
the time being, nobody cares, every body still have to learn the
meaning of

1 + 2 * 3

Best regards,

Pierre Weis

INRIA, Projet Cristal, Pierre.Weis@inria.fr, http://pauillac.inria.fr/~weis/

(*) In their slang those pupils use upper case letters to mean that
this is true, also to insist that this is not only true but also TRUE,
and even that this is definitely _TRUE_.
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