Re: [Caml-list] A G'Caml question" + additional info

["Krishnaswami, Neel" <neelk@cswcasa.com>]

Markus Mottl [mailto:markus@mail4.ai.univie.ac.at] writes:
> On Wed, 11 Jul 2001, Bruce Hoult wrote:
> > But the language itself seems to be starting to rival C++ for sheer
> > complexity. When you want to do something you seem to have a choice
> > of using this feature, or *this* one, or *this* newly developed one.
> 
> Having choices is not necessarily bad, being forced to using many
> alternatives is. I think that OCaml has succeeded quite well so far in
> keeping different features apart as one can see in the standard library,
> which can be used with the core language + modules alone. I hope this
> will stay so!

Permit me to disagree. I find nearly all of OCaml's features highly
useful and orthogonal, and I am only working on medium size projects. 

For instance, I recently wrote yet another set implementation, because 
the functorial interface to the Set module in the standard library 
wouldn't let me use it in a fully polymorphic fashion. If the Set 
library had been written using OCaml's object system, then I would 
not have had to redo my own. From this experience I conclude that the 
right thing is to use the features that offer the nicest degree of
modularity and reusability.

I can offer a demonstration if you are interested, but to illustrate 
I'd need to show both approaches in about 75 lines of code, which may 
be too much for a public email. 

--
Neel Krishnaswami
neelk@cswcasa.com
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