Re: Ant: [Caml-list] Efficiency of let/and

[Marius Nita <marius@cs.pdx.edu>]

Martin Chabr wrote:
> As it appears to me, there is no semantic difference
> between both alternatives.

I've always thought that there was. In the `and' form, the bindings 
cannot depend on each other. The program you pasted shouldn't run in any 
(recent) OCaml toplevel. Are you using a really old one or something?

-marius

It can be shown with two
> dependent expressions y = 1 and z = y + 2:
> 
> # let y = 1 in
>   let z = y + 2 in
>   z;;
> - : int = 3
> 
> # let y = 1
>   and z = y + 2 in
>   z;;
> - : int = 3
> 
> The order is important in both cases:
> 
> # let z = y + 2 in
>   let y = x + 1 in
>   z;;
> Characters 8-9:
>   let z = y + 2 in
>           ^
> Unbound value y
> 
> # let z = y + 2
>   and y = 1 in
>   z;;
> Characters 8-9:
>   let z = y + 2
>           ^
> Unbound value y
> 
> So the "and"-form depends on the order as well and I
> think the syntactic difference can be just used for
> documentation. A good idea, by the way.
> 
> I hope this helps
> 
> Martin
> 
> 
> 
> --- Brian Hurt <bhurt@spnz.org> schrieb:
> 
>> Say I have two variables I want to set- variable a
>> to the value expr1 and 
>> variable b to the value expr2.  The two expressions
>> are pure (no side 
>> effects), and neither one depends upon the other
>> (neither expr1 nor expr2 
>> contain either a or b as a value), so they can be
>> evaluated in either 
>> order or in parallel with no harm.  With expressions
>> like these, I've 
>> gotten into the habit of using let/and to express
>> the parallelism, that is 
>> I go:
>>
>>  	let a = expr1
>>  	and b = expr2
>>  	in
>>  	...
>>
>> rather than:
>>  	let a = expr1 in
>>  	let b = expr2 in
>>
>> So my question is: is there any value (other than
>> the documentation value) 
>> in doing this?
>>
>> Just wondering.
>>
>> Brian
>>
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> 
> 
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