Re: [Caml-list] environment idiom

[Andrej Bauer <Andrej.Bauer@andrej.com>]

It seems that John Skaller and I have different experiences, which is to
be expected (unless compilers are like web applications, which I doubt).

Clearly, as John and others pointed out, we can usually predict that
certain sets of related arguments will be needed frequently, so it makes
sense to make an exception to the "pass exactly what is needed" rule and
bundle such sets together (as objects/records describing cgi request,
host info, database connection, user-session etc). To repeat myself:
this is what I did in my second attempt, and the results were better
than the first attempt, when I stuck everything in a lookup table.

John claims things get complicated in my proposed solution when code is
unstable and requires lots of changes. He offers a C/C++ example of the
const pointers. I am not convinced that ocaml and C/C++ are comparable
in this respect. I habitually abuse the ocaml compiler to tell me
precisely what needs to be changed in the following way: I change a type
or value definition (say, change the arguments to a function) and keep
running the compiler until it reports errors, fixing them as they come
up. Had I used conglomerate lookup tables instead of arguments, or any
other form of argument passing that the compiler cannot analyze, the
compiler would be of little help. You would just postpone the problem to
runtime.

But don't get me wrong. I definitely agree with John that having 10
arguments to a functions sounds like too many, and something needs to be
done in such cases. It's just that in my web application (and I suspect
in most) I don't have 10 arguments all over the code, but more like 3 or
4, which is ok. Certainly different types of programs require different
solutions.

Best regards,

Andrej