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

[Patrick M Doane <patrick@watson.org>]

On Mon, 2 Jul 2001, Brian Rogoff wrote:

> I'm convinced that the include scheme, when properly integrated with
> modules, will be sufficient. We need more experience with the current
> scheme. 

I'm convinced now too, it took me a day or two to think things over to
come to the same conclusion.

Caml already has support for generic programming by using functors but
they can get cumbersome when concepts are highly separated.  For example,
I usually see every algorithm written as a functor.  This is very
powerful, but requires many more lines of code for all the functor
instantiation. In some sense, we also lose a nice aspect of core ML -- the
ability to avoid specifying types. 

Initially I thought that G'caml (when integrated with the rest of the
language) wouldn't be able to improve on this model for writing libraries. 
When all the code is under central control, the code can obviously be
reordered such that all generic values come before all derived generics. 

I now see that a library which wants to provide generic algorithms will be
much easier to write with G'caml.  Rather than providing a functor for
every algorithm which must be instantiated in for a large variety of
types, the library would provide one functor per module which needs to be
instantiated once with the generic values defined by the application. This
all makes sense, and is easy to trace/follow manually.

Patrick


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