For what it's worth, my feeling is that even if there weren't technical
reasons to require the "rec'' marking for recursive functions, I would want
it as a language feature.  Recursive definitions are harder to understand
than non recursive ones, and it's helpful to have the static guarantee that
only definitions so marked will be allowed to refer to themselves.  This
makes it hard to mistakenly refer to yourself, which I think is a real
source of error.

y
On Jan 2, 2012 5:38 PM, "Diego Olivier Fernandez Pons" <dofp.ocaml@gmail.com>
wrote:

>     List,
>
> I was wondering if there was any reason not to make "let rec" the default
> / sole option, meaning cases where you clearly don't want a "let rec"
> instead of "let" (only in functions, not cyclic data).
>
>          Diego Olivier
>