Re: Warnings in ocaml

["Frank A. Christoph" <christo@nextsolution.co.jp>]

 Jacques GARRIGUE <garrigue@kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp> wrote:
>I have a few comments about new warnings in ocaml.
>
>* having a warning when a function doesn't return unit in a sequence
>may catch some bugs, but this is a pain with imperative programming
>style, where you may not be interested by the result of a function but
>just by its side-effects. Of course you can switch off the warning,
>but I'm not sure having it on is a good default, since the default
>mode should be normative.
>
>ex. wrong code
> x = 3; ...
>   ^ should be <-
>
>ex. right code
> f x y; ...
>where f: t1 -> t2 -> int has some interesting side-effect.

I copied from SML and defined a procedure "ignore":

  let ignore k =
    let _ = k in ()

so now I would write:

  ignore (f x y); ...

I agree that it can be a pain to be explicit about this sometimes, but "ignore" makes it fairly transparent.

BTW, this procedure is a good candidate for addition to the standard library.

--FC