Re: [Caml-list] Notation for currying

[David Rajchenbach-Teller <David.Teller@ens-lyon.org>]

As a side question, is currying really an important language feature? In
my experience, it hinders readability and makes it harder to reason
about types ("wait, is it weakly or strongly polymorphic? exactly which
type variables were generalized?")

After coding a number of years in languages without currying, I haven't
found myself lacking this feature a single time.

Cheers,
 David

On 21/11/15 18:24, Hendrik Boom wrote:
> On Fri, Nov 06, 2015 at 01:34:11PM +0100, Gabriel Scherer wrote:
>>
>> I personally believe that currified constructor syntax would be a better
>> choice, and that using non-currified constructors is a historical mistake
>> of SML/Caml. But I am also not convinced that efforts to change it today
>> are worth the trouble, and prefer to concentrate on improving other parts
>> of the OCaml ecosystem.
> 
> Perhaps there should be explicit syntax for currying, such as
>    f a b _
> instead of 
>    f a b
> That would permit currying in other argument positions:
>    f a _ c
> though I suspect _ may be the wrong symbol for the current language, and 
> I also suspect it's far too late tointroduce it in the current language.
> 
> I have noticed that almost a the situations where the compiler thinks I 
> mean to curry I actually just left out a parameter by mistake.  The type 
> inferences it makes based on these errors usually occur elsewhere and 
> are truly mystifying.
> 
> -- hendrik
>