Re: [Caml-list] function vs. parser

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

Brian Rogoff [mailto:bpr@best.com] wrote:
> On Thu, 13 Sep 2001, Krishnaswami, Neel wrote:
> >
> > Yeah, it's a convention, since types are first-class values 
> > in Dylan. Such conventions are easy to create in Dylan because 
> > it's way permissive about which characters are legal in identifiers 
> > than most languages are -- almost all punctuation is legal. This 
> > produces a different set of complaints, though: people are unhappy 
> > that they have to write "foo + bar", because "foo+bar" is a distinct
> > identifier.
> 
> This is a good thing IMO. The only exceptions of course being 
> things like (), ;, and ",".

I agree with you, but the sheer volume is astounding. If I were a 
language designer, I'd strongly consider restricting identifiers to 
[a-zA-Z0-9_] just to keep the noise level down! It sucks, but in a
traditional way. :)

> > > Maybe in a post-Unicode world everything will be OK.
> 
> I guess I really should have put a :-) there, huh?

Probably -- I've seen too many people seriously propose this to read
it as a joke anymore.

> > Doesn't Caml use such a convention to set the precedence of infix
> > functions, so that *.. has higher precedence that +..?
> 
> Yes, be careful with | vs || and stuff like that with infixes. I got
> burned there recently. Doh!

Ooh, that's nasty. 

> > I think that's pretty neat actually. I find it much more readable 
> > than Haskell's `backquote` mechanism.
> 
> But you can use names with backquotes.

That's -why- I find it more readable. Simple juxtaposition is usually
left-to-right function application, with the exception that things made
of nonalphabetic characters are infix. Seeing something like x `frob` y
is really hard for me to read, since I want to read it as the function
x taking two arguments. But maybe this just takes a little more practice 
than I've had.

Anyway, for some Caml-related content, is there a way to use qualified 
paths and infix notation together?

I mean, if I have:

  module Foo = struct let (+++) x y = List.append x y end

Right now I have to write 
 
  Foo.(+++) [1; 2] [3; 4]

Is there any way I can write something like 

  [1; 2] Foo.+++ [3; 4]

without using open or rebinding the Foo module's function in the local
namespace?
 
--
Neel Krishnaswami
neelk@cswcasa.com
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