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Date: Fri, 28 Mar 2008 20:14:01 +0100
From: "blue storm" <bluestorm.dylc@gmail.com>
To: "David Thomas" <david_hd@yahoo.com>
Subject: Re: [Caml-list] The Bridge Pattern in OCaml
Cc: "Raoul Duke" <raould@gmail.com>, caml-list@yquem.inria.fr
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	 <17503.82869.qm@web30502.mail.mud.yahoo.com>
X-Spam: no; 0.00; ocaml:01 haskell:01 haskell:01 o'caml:01 o'caml:01 monads:01 monadic:01 camlp:01 syntax:01 storm:98 caml-list:01 computation:01 behaviour:01 algorithm:01 define:02 

> In Haskell, it would be very neat - define a Monad for composing the
> ASTs and then code just like you would any other Haskell program,
> you're just using a different Monad from normal.

>  In O'Caml, a lot less neat because the user providing the behaviour
> suddenly isn't really coding the algorithm in O'Caml, but creating a
> data-structure that represents the computation.

Could you elaborate a bit on this ?
It seems me that monads only provide (in this particular case) a
limited syntaxic sugar. Are they really an improvement ? If you've got
some example of monadic AST-building, i'd be interested.

Couldn't the pa_monad extension achieve the same job ? The more
general (and heavyweight) solution would be to build a full DSL using
camlp4, but i'm not sure of what you can win with a dedicated syntax.