Re: [Caml-list] undocumented external ... = "%identity"

["Nicolas Cannasse" <warplayer@free.fr>]

[...]
> ... or a change in the data representations used by the compiler and
> runtime.
>
> > Such major changes are usually backward compatibile, if not I suppose
> > the Obj.magic forward porting problem will be the minor problem
> > programmer will have with a new ocaml release ...
>
> Not true.  We can make changes that break many uses of Obj.magic without
> changing the language or the type system.  That's why Obj.magic is not
> documented.

To be 100% honest, you should say that such a change would break most of the
Ocaml interfaces to C librairies, and that such a change have is then highly
unexpectable (at least I hope so for the sake of Ocaml). Documenting
Obj.magic would have the benefit to make people better understand the
underlying C representation of caml values, and then writing more efficient
code - and start writing more C libraries....

Nicolas Cannasse

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