From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: from mail1-relais-roc.national.inria.fr (mail1-relais-roc.national.inria.fr [192.134.164.82]) by walapai.inria.fr (8.13.6/8.13.6) with ESMTP id pBR7jEaW025511 for ; Tue, 27 Dec 2011 08:45:14 +0100 X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Filtered: true X-IronPort-Anti-Spam-Result: AuYAAB13+U7RVdI2kGdsb2JhbABCnAGQPwgiAQEBAQkJDQcUBCGBcgEBAQQSAiwBGx0BAwwGBQsDOB4EAREBBQEcBjWgIgqLZYJrhCg/iHECBQuMBASMZ4gbjX09g3s X-IronPort-AV: E=Sophos;i="4.71,414,1320620400"; d="scan'208";a="136953696" Received: from mail-pz0-f54.google.com ([209.85.210.54]) by mail1-smtp-roc.national.inria.fr with ESMTP/TLS/RC4-SHA; 27 Dec 2011 08:45:03 +0100 Received: by dakp5 with SMTP id p5so12553648dak.27 for ; Mon, 26 Dec 2011 23:45:01 -0800 (PST) DKIM-Signature: v=1; a=rsa-sha256; c=relaxed/relaxed; d=gmail.com; s=gamma; h=mime-version:reply-to:in-reply-to:references:from:date:message-id :subject:to:cc:content-type; bh=ny35w4mrvXJcRBLWke1sX91yCRyVOmDuMJSarFywAq8=; b=BuhPW1CD3ayZHwgEkJU4vvdEJB1dinTza//TRZQEbRsbuvzu2cvY2PrRqBmKanHlWX 50e+Vmk8rjYOej/9fZ3EUWaRoEi6u9g68nDDEn/JvBLKV1Wx/oFrcS6Sy6vMuJs7XCcG jObVvDQbDsFST33778sFXMX3ny8lkKpXbym74= Received: by 10.68.191.102 with SMTP id gx6mr41383153pbc.12.1324971901265; Mon, 26 Dec 2011 23:45:01 -0800 (PST) MIME-Version: 1.0 Received: by 10.142.177.14 with HTTP; Mon, 26 Dec 2011 23:44:40 -0800 (PST) Reply-To: david.baelde@ens-lyon.org In-Reply-To: References: <4EF43C29.9090409@rktmb.org> From: David Baelde Date: Tue, 27 Dec 2011 08:44:40 +0100 Message-ID: To: Martin Koch Cc: Mihamina Rakotomandimby , caml-list@inria.fr Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Subject: Re: [Caml-list] polymorphism in general Hi, I would say that any value whose type contains a generalized type variable ('a, 'b, etc.) is polymorphic. The empty list (of type 'a list) is polymorphic: let empty = [] in (1::empty, "2"::empty) And so is the function always returning the empty list, even though it has no polymorphic argument: let empty () = [] My 2 cents, -- David