Re: [Caml-list] How much optimized is the 'a option type ?

["Jonathan Kimmitt" <jonathan@kimmitt.co.uk>]

In my humble opinion the main purpose of Some _ | None is to avoid the
requirement for a nil pointer in OCaml. If an external function wants to
return nil in order to indicate, for example that a certain resource is not
available, it can return None instead and this prevents dereferencing a nil
pointer in OCaml because the None cannot be dereferenced. If you compare this
behaviour with the inferior clone F# written by Microsoft, you can see that
one of the things they added to the language was a nil pointer, thus
abandoning all type safety immediately and all because they did not want to
change their .NET runtime system for C# etc. They also have the notion of
initialising a typed object to in an invalid default, which is another obvious
disaster area. Oh and did I mention operators like +/- etc are overloaded so
you cannot infer function types without adding type annotations.
The final insult is to make indentation significant in the syntax so that if
you post a program to a list which does not respect whitespace (for example
using a well-known Microsoft mail client), it completely destroys the meaning
of the program.

I'm sure the authors of F# have their reasons for making all these changes,
and I'm not one to stand in the way of progress, and I don't set out to offend
anybody, but I think they got it wrong ...