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 RAA27415; Thu, 26 Jul 2001 17:48:00 +0200 (MET DST) X-Authentication-Warning: pauillac.inria.fr: majordomo set sender to owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr using -f Received: from concorde.inria.fr (concorde.inria.fr [192.93.2.39]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id RAA27411 for ; Thu, 26 Jul 2001 17:47:59 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from shell5.ba.best.com (shell5.ba.best.com [206.184.139.136]) by concorde.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.10.0) with ESMTP id f6QFlwv29274 for ; Thu, 26 Jul 2001 17:47:58 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from localhost (bpr@localhost) by shell5.ba.best.com (8.9.3/8.9.2/best.sh) with ESMTP id IAA03464; Thu, 26 Jul 2001 08:47:51 -0700 (PDT) Date: Thu, 26 Jul 2001 08:47:51 -0700 (PDT) From: Brian Rogoff To: Miles Egan cc: caml-list@inria.fr Subject: Re: [Caml-list] a reckless proposal In-Reply-To: <20010726082735.A65526@caddr.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Precedence: bulk On Thu, 26 Jul 2001, Miles Egan wrote: > On Wed, Jul 25, 2001 at 08:15:49AM -0700, Brian Rogoff wrote: > > It also seems that you'd like to eliminate these false friends (good phrase, > > especially for a bilingual French-English mailing list!) by subsuming them > > into features that mainstream programmers know well. That would be a > > mistake, since you'd end up with a mainstream language. > > I certainly wouldn't generally characterize my intentions that way. I'm more > interested in re-evaluating gratuitous differences. At any rate, I agree that > the loss of pattern-matching more than outweighs the benefits in this case. > Ocaml is stylistically quite comfortably out of the mainstream in many ways and > I'm sure it will remain so. I think pattern matching is a compelling feature. I'd like to see extensions to OCaml's pattern matching, like the SMLish ability to to distinguish a partial and full record match (yeah I know backwards compatibility may be an issue). And views, and... > > > 90s). Ada packages correspond very closely to ML modules, and there are > > even crude approximations to functors and signatures in Ada 95 (generic > > formal package parameters in Ada parlance). > > It's not the combination of packaging and polymorphism in Ocaml that I think is > confusing. In fact, I think it's one of it's most compelling features. It's > the fact that compilation units are implicit top-level modules with special > properties. A few paragraphs in the documentation explaining top-level modules > and the relationship between source files and implicit top-level modules might > clarify this a bit better for new users. http://caml.inria.fr/ocaml/htmlman/manual005.html section 4.5 explains it. Maybe a few more paragraphs showing how to use module types, functors, and top level modules in a smallish compiled program would help? > Perhaps some kind of "Ocaml for Java Programmers" FAQ might be useful? I don't use Java enough that it's the source of false friends. Are you volunteering? -- Brian ------------------- Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/ To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr