Re: [Caml-list] Function forward declaration?

[Richard Jones <rich@annexia.org>]

On Tue, Apr 06, 2004 at 10:39:26AM -0700, brogoff@speakeasy.net wrote:
> There was a discussion of this a looooong time ago, in the context
> of supporting polymorphic recursion in the language, and I believe
> it was mentioned that some experimental Caml compiler had a forward
> declaration capability. It seems like a good idea, and I wonder why
> it hasn't made it into the language, as this is a FAQ and a language
> blemish.

I was wondering this too.  Is there some reason why we couldn't
add a way to do forward declarations, eg:

val g : unit -> int		(* prototype; val is already reserved word *)

let f () = (* ... *) g ()

(* some intervening code which makes it difficult to use let rec ... and *)

let g () = (* ... *) 42		(* compiler checks that g matches proto *)

?  Seems it would preserve type safety.

Rich.

-- 
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