Re: [Caml-list] where are we on the Hoogle for OCaml front?

[Francois BERENGER <francois.c.berenger@vanderbilt.edu>]

On 02/06/2017 09:46 AM, Daniel Bünzli wrote:
> On Saturday, 4 February 2017 at 04:58, Jacques Garrigue wrote:
>> For search by type signature you can use Jun Furuse's OCamlOScope:
>
> I'm a little bit curious. While I can see the benefit of having general full text search over value identifiers, type identifier and doc strings I was always a little bit dubious about type signature search -- in the end ML types for themselves are a rather weak specification language (I'm not talking about the invariants you may hide behind those of course).

For sure, a plain text search is also very useful and should be provided 
by such a tool (a search "a la Google"; by keywords).

> So beyond curiosity searches are actually people seriously using this to lookup a value they might need ?

But, when you have no idea of how people call the function you are 
looking for, you would go for the search by type signature.

And, because you are not lucky every time, the "hoogle for ocaml" should 
also give you interesting results even when the type signature you have 
input contains some errors.
Like, if the type signature you typed does not exist, you may be 
interested by the closest matching type signature.