On 01/19/2015 08:33 AM, oleg@okmij.org wrote:

Current OCaml syntax has shortage of pattern binding expression and
only usable is let%xxx p = e in which is a bit pain for ppx writers.

Indeed. One may wish that

         let rec p = e1 in e2

were treated as if it were
         let[@ocaml.let "rec"] p = e1 in e2

and likewise let module.

Please, no!  Attributes are intended to add meta-data for external tools (ppx, tools parsing .cmt files, etc), perhaps also to tweak the behavior of the compiler (trigger/control warnings, etc), certainly not to encode core language features (otherwise, let's use s-expressions instead of Parsetree).  Facilitating language experiments is also a good use for attributes, but not as a long-term solution for the official compiler.

Come to think of it, 'rec! or 'module' are
annotations on let.

"let module" has a different shape (module identifiers/types/expressions) than "let".  And it doesn't seem realistic to merge, say, core types and module types, or core expressions and module expressions.


Alain

--
Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list
Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs