From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from majordomo@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id GAA22279; Mon, 2 Apr 2001 06:27:03 +0200 (MET DST) X-Authentication-Warning: pauillac.inria.fr: majordomo set sender to owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr using -f Received: from nez-perce.inria.fr (nez-perce.inria.fr [192.93.2.78]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id GAA22503 for ; Mon, 2 Apr 2001 06:27:02 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from shell5.ba.best.com (shell5.ba.best.com [206.184.139.136]) by nez-perce.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.10.0) with ESMTP id f324R1D03890 for ; Mon, 2 Apr 2001 06:27:01 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from localhost (bpr@localhost) by shell5.ba.best.com (8.9.3/8.9.2/best.sh) with ESMTP id VAA09409 for ; Sun, 1 Apr 2001 21:27:00 -0700 (PDT) Date: Sun, 1 Apr 2001 21:26:59 -0700 (PDT) From: Brian Rogoff To: caml-list@inria.fr Subject: [Caml-list] petty complaints Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Precedence: bulk Hi, In response to the recent query about string libraries I took my own advice and ported the Mosml substring library to OCaml. This exercise raised a question which I've had before but never seen asked or answered, namely, why doesn't OCaml use something like SML's order datatype GREATER | EQUAL | LESS for comparison rather than an integer? It seems against the spirit of static typing. What's the rationale? Efficiency? Hysterical raisins? Another unrelated trifling question concerns the syntax of numerical literals. Would it be possible to allow a la Ada the insertion of _s in a numerical literal so instead of 1000000,10000000,and 100000000 we could write 1_000_000, 10_000_000, 100_000_000? Of course, as in Ada, you could allow wrongly positioned or superfluous _s (1_00_00_______0) but I think this trivial change can make reading numbers a bit nicer. -- Brian ------------------- To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr. Archives: http://caml.inria.fr