From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from weis@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id TAA12570 for caml-red; Tue, 10 Oct 2000 19:01:47 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from nez-perce.inria.fr (nez-perce.inria.fr [192.93.2.78]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id OAA07491 for ; Tue, 10 Oct 2000 14:46:38 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from opus.cs.cornell.edu (exchange.cs.cornell.edu [128.84.97.8]) by nez-perce.inria.fr (8.10.0/8.10.0) with ESMTP id e9ACkbH04522 for ; Tue, 10 Oct 2000 14:46:37 +0200 (MET DST) Received: by opus.cs.cornell.edu with Internet Mail Service (5.5.2650.21) id ; Tue, 10 Oct 2000 08:46:36 -0400 Message-ID: <706871B20764CD449DB0E8E3D81C4D43BFCA14@opus.cs.cornell.edu> From: Greg Morrisett To: caml-list@inria.fr Subject: RE: Undefined evaluation order Date: Tue, 10 Oct 2000 08:46:35 -0400 MIME-Version: 1.0 X-Mailer: Internet Mail Service (5.5.2650.21) Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Sender: weis@pauillac.inria.fr > In retrospect, perhaps we should have considered introducing "let" > bindings automatically to preserve left-to-right semantics within the > push-enter model (like Moscow ML does, I think), although this entails > a performance hit for the bytecode interpreter. Let me put in a vote for left-to-right ordering. I've also been bitten by the evaluation order (with almost exactly the same kind of code -- reading a record's values from some file). But more importantly, the primary reasons I chose SML over O'Caml for my class this semester is that the evaluation model of SML is more uniform. Left-to-right in O'Caml might well change my mind. On this note, I find the discussion of syntax very interesting. Teaching either variant of ML to a group of students raised on Visual Basic, Java, and Javascript is not easy, and today's ML implementations are not very student-friendly when it comes to either parse- or type-error messages... -Greg