On Thursday 03 April 2008 19:51:26 daniel.c.buenzli wrote: > On 3 avr, 20:22, Jon Harrop <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > The appropriate call is selected by the compiler after monomorphization. > > So there is no ambiguity or need for type annotations etc. > > Well you need to tell the compiler at least once otherwise he won't > know that e.g. you want to use physical equality on the strings for > this set instead of say structural equality. As a side effect this can > be the source of interesting and hard to catch bugs (forgot to coerce > to the right subtype) that you won't get with the more explicit > functor way.
Sure. F# simply cures a practically important class of bugs that OCaml leaves wide open. Other bugs still exist. > As always the less explicit you are the harder it is to reunderstand > or find bugs in your code. That is an awful policy. Not only is type inference an obvious counter-example but the complexity required by OCaml to solve mundane problems is clearly counter-productive. Look at the current thread on the caml-list about how unusable the Int64 type is. > I always find it interesting that people > use terseness vs explicitness as a criterion to judge programming > languages. In fact programming language designer should create them > with code reading and not code typing in mind, but since lines of code > to achieve a task seem to be the (unreliable) metric among > programmers, this won't happen anytime soon. Brevity isn't really the issue here. OCaml makes it easy to introduce serious silent data-corrupting bugs into your code in this respect and F# does not. The fact that F# also happens to be substantially more concise is really incidental. -- Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd. http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?e --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "ocaml-developer" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/ocaml-developer?hl=en For other OCaml forums, see http://caml.inria.fr/resources/forums.en.html -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
