Re: fancy types (was Re: [Caml-list] ocaml killer)

[james woodyatt <jhw@wetware.com>]

On 29 Jan 2004, at 08:20, William Lovas wrote:
> [...] (which already exists in the standard library, it being
> mysteriously named Obj.magic and its use being highly discouraged).  
> In all
> of my scenarios, regular old parametric polymorphism was able to 
> handle the
> typing.  In what sort of situation have you needed this identity 
> function?

I needed to use it in two places in the Cf library I recently released.

	1) In Cf_deque, for bootstrapping the data structure.
	2) In Cf_gadget, for unifying continuations in the scheduler.

Its use is highly discouraged for good reason.  You don't want to know 
what it was like trying to get the bugs out of code that used this 
function improperly.


-- 
j h woodyatt <jhw@wetware.com>
markets are only free to the people who own them.

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