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 QAA02255; Fri, 30 Mar 2001 16:16:45 +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 QAA02165; Fri, 30 Mar 2001 16:16:44 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from indigo.recherche.enac.fr (indigo.recherche.enac.fr [195.220.158.66]) by nez-perce.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.10.0) with ESMTP id f2UEGi919739; Fri, 30 Mar 2001 16:16:44 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from rouge.recherche.enac.fr (mail@rouge.recherche.enac.fr [10.31.1.70] (may be forged)) by indigo.recherche.enac.fr (8.8.6 (PHNE_14041)/8.6.11) with ESMTP id QAA11204; Fri, 30 Mar 2001 16:16:08 +0200 (METDST) Received: from localhost ([127.0.0.1] helo=recherche.enac.fr ident=alliot) by rouge.recherche.enac.fr with esmtp (Exim 3.12 #1 (Debian)) id 14izhA-0003O0-00; Fri, 30 Mar 2001 16:16:08 +0200 Message-ID: <3AC49528.1F13D15C@recherche.enac.fr> Date: Fri, 30 Mar 2001 16:16:08 +0200 From: Jean-Marc Alliot X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.76 [en] (X11; U; Linux 2.4.0 i686) X-Accept-Language: fr, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: bcpierce@cis.upenn.edu CC: Francois.Pottier@inria.fr, Jacques Garrigue , caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Subject: Re: [Caml-list] Future of labels References: <24190.985956070@saul.cis.upenn.edu> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Precedence: bulk "Benjamin C. Pierce" wrote: > One thing to be careful of, though, is making the language a lot more > difficult to use for newcomers. The present language design has the > advantage that people do not have to start out understanding labels to do > anything at all in OCaml -- they can learn about them much later, when > they start doing fancy GUI programming or whatever. > > This property makes OCaml at the moment a much better language for > *teaching* than, say, Java, where there are about a dozen fairly deep > concepts that you have to understand before you can write even the > smallest program. We use OCaml at Penn for teaching intro programming to > hundreds of undergraduates, and the main attraction is that you can write > significant programs in a tiny subset of the language. > I completely support Benjamin opinion. We have exactly the same kind of problems with our students and it would be a real pain if they had to learn labels from the start. So, my only strong wish is to still be able to use OCAML without having to know anything about labels. Note : I still find labels useful, especially in GUI bindings. And this comment is in noway a criticism of Jacques Garrigue excellent work. -- | Jean-Marc Alliot | | http://www.recherche.enac.fr/~alliot | | alliot@recherche.enac.fr | ------------------- To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr. Archives: http://caml.inria.fr