Backward compatibility is of the UTMOST importance.
Developers tend to assume that people who wrote package X can always adapt it to new conventions, but often this is just not true: the developers may be working on other things now, their interests may have shifted, and great packages get left behind and are eventually lost.
Let's make an example: George Necula in Berkeley wrote (with his students) CIL, a superb front-end to C code analysis. Suppose the Ocaml syntax changes in a non-trivial way. Would he be willing, and have time, to fix CIL? To spend his time in a job with zero innovation content, and lots of frustration? It is anyone's bet. And what about in five years from now? Who knows?
There is a point in which people move on, and it is very important that software continues to work in a stable way, or we are losing great work all the time -- and there is some great work that is not easy at all to redo. Yes, the language survives, but the software not always.
Luca
On 8/19/07, Stefano Zacchiroli <zack@bononia.it> wrote:
On Sun, Aug 19, 2007 at 06:07:16PM +0100, Richard Jones wrote:
> It's not likely that the syntax can be changed (how is the revised
> syntax doing lately?) but there is one error message which could be
Well, yes, the syntax can be changed and it isn't hard either.
It's just a matter of stating something like «from version x.y the
official syntax is the revised one, you can use the provided converter
for migrating your old code to the new syntax». Other languages have
seen similar migrations in the past and they survived.
Point is that upstream OCaml authors have never acknowledged that the
current syntax is more than sub-optimal and the fear of missing backward
compatibility has done the rest.
The revised syntax is far better, but there has never been the
willingness to push it.
Cheers.
--
Stefano Zacchiroli -*- PhD in Computer Science ............... now what?
zack@{cs.unibo.it,debian.org,bononia.it} -%- http://www.bononia.it/zack/
(15:56:48) Zack: e la demo dema ? /\ All one has to do is hit the
(15:57:15) Bac: no, la demo scema \/ right keys at the right time
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