[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > If the ML designers were going to borrow syntax they only had a few > places to borrow from: FORTRAN, one of the Algol-like languages, LISP > or maybe APL. Borrowing from CPL or BCPL wouldn't have been entirely silly > even back then (although the smart money would have been on FORTRAN).
Well since O'Caml and ML are functional languages, I see LISP as a conceptual if not syntactic ancestor of O'caml and ML. The syntactic ancestor of ML is mathematics (let x = ...) which dates back at least 2000 years. > If you want another example, look at oaklisp (yes, go and search for it). > When you read the design documents you can't help realising, "hey, this is > actually Java," but oaklisp sat on the shelf being a great idea with no one > using it for about 10 years until Sun came along and reworked exactly the > same idea with a C-like syntax and suddenly it got popular. The very existance and popularity of Python is a perfect counter example. However, yes, the O'caml syntax is weird for people who have only programmed in C, C++, Java, and Perl. Erik -- +-----------------------------------------------------------+ Erik de Castro Lopo +-----------------------------------------------------------+ "Projects promoting programming in natural language are intrinsically doomed to fail." -- Edsger Dijkstra -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
