[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
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