Re: [Caml-list] teaching OCaml

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

Dear Robert,
  Since you are thinking of switching to F#, without Microsoft bashing I do
feel I have to point out some of the shortcomings of their functional
language. First of all by using the CLR it runs rather slowly, especially
considering almost everything is an object. The second blunder is the re-
introduction of the NULL pointer, that beast of many horns which OCaml works
so hard to get rid of (Some _/None is the type-safe alternative). A further
complication for beginners is that the char type is unicode so it is not
possible to make use of nice syntax like "match ch with 'A'..'Z'". But the
real bugbear for teaching is that indentation is by default significant in the
syntax (instead of using ()/begin/end like OCaml). You can easily imagine the
wonderful results of importing an indentation specific language into Outlook
or Word to write an assignment given the cavalier attitude to line breaks
which is taken by the Office suite in general. I know there are supporters of
the lite syntax on the list but to me it is a can of worms, comparable to the
way that Outlook uppercases every word at the beginning of a line whether it
is the start of a sentence or not. Finally don't forget F# has operator
overloading so in a routine
"let f x y = x+y" instead of assuming x and y are integers as OCaml would do,
instead some obscure error message pops up such as "unable to infer type in
this context". Plus ça change plus c'est la même chose ..