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 QAA11563; Fri, 17 May 2002 16:32:28 +0200 (MET DST) X-Authentication-Warning: pauillac.inria.fr: majordomo set sender to owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr using -f Received: from concorde.inria.fr (concorde.inria.fr [192.93.2.39]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id QAA11440 for ; Fri, 17 May 2002 16:32:27 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from pauillac.inria.fr (pauillac.inria.fr [128.93.11.35]) by concorde.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.11.1) with ESMTP id g4HEWQf27380; Fri, 17 May 2002 16:32:26 +0200 (MET DST) Received: (from weis@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id QAA11555; Fri, 17 May 2002 16:32:26 +0200 (MET DST) From: Pierre Weis Message-Id: <200205171432.QAA11555@pauillac.inria.fr> Subject: Re: [Caml-list] Camlp4/OCaml [was: Generating C stubs] In-Reply-To: <3CE44F7A.6040509@baretta.com> from Alessandro Baretta at "May 17, 102 02:31:54 am" To: alex@baretta.com (Alessandro Baretta) Date: Fri, 17 May 2002 16:32:26 +0200 (MET DST) Cc: caml-list@inria.fr X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL28 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Precedence: bulk > 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_. ------------------- To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/ Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners