[Caml-list] { ... } vs ( ... ) vs begin ... end

[Frederic van der Plancke <fvdp@decis.be>]

> Brian Hurt <brian.hurt@qlogic.com> writes:
> 
> > On Tue, 8 Apr 2003, Daniel Andor wrote:
> >
> >> On Tuesday 08 April 2003 8:04 pm, Brian Hurt wrote:
> >> > If we're going to be introducing gratuitous backwards incompatiblities,
> >> > can we please do it for something usefull?  Like say replacing begin/end
> >> > with { and }.
> >>
> >> If I may be a beginner here: how does "begin ... end" differ from "( ... )"?
> >> In practice I've found them to be interchangable, but that could just be an
> >> accident.

No, that's by design AFAIK. I'm no longer using begin-end, because I like 
punctuation to be light on the eye.

> >
> > At the linguistic level, not at all.  At the text editor level, it's
> > easier in vi to jump to match braces than matching begin/ends.

You seem to have missed the difference between ( ... ) and { ... }, the
message you answered used the first form.

There's a big problem with introducing { ... } as synonymous for begin-end:
constructs like  { a = b }  become ambiguous and only the type-checker can
lift the ambiguity.

Frédéric vdP

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