Re: [Caml-list] use of ";;" when teaching Ocaml

[Gerd Stolpmann <info@gerd-stolpmann.de>]

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Am Montag, den 22.06.2015, 17:07 +0100 schrieb Mark Shinwell:
> I've heard the argument of Gerd from various people on many occasions.
> Personally, I don't buy it; I think the situation where the error
> message is deficient doesn't happen very often, whereas ";;" is
> syntactic clutter that I have to see every day (and would rather not
> see).

Note that I personally normally don't use ;; because I am very aware of
the problem and fluent enough in the OCaml syntax to help myself. I was
mentioning this point because beginners are not fluent, and they will
run into the problem of getting syntax errors where everything looks
alright.

Also, I actually don't see why not using ";;" is considered cleaner.
It's a bit like writing sentences without full stop (and I think the
analogy to natural languages is quite insightful because there you also
have the situation of open-ended syntactical constructions, and nobody
complains when authors use "." to mark the end of sentences). After all,
it's a matter of preference and practical usefulness.

As a side note, the situation would be different if the compiler emitted
warnings about obviously wrong indentation, because the information
where the writer thinks that a new definition begins is also already
included in the indentation.

Gerd

> 
> Mark
> 
> On 22 June 2015 at 16:56, Thomas Refis <thomas.refis@gmail.com> wrote:
> > 2015-06-22 16:48 GMT+01:00 Damien Doligez <damien.doligez@inria.fr>:
> >> Gerd has totally nailed it, and that's the reason why I always use ;;
> >> in my code.
> >> If we had another keyword for toplevel let (let without in) the
> >> situation would be quite different.
> >
> > http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-camlp4/manual007.html !
> >
> > --
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> > Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
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-- 
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Gerd Stolpmann, Darmstadt, Germany    gerd@gerd-stolpmann.de
My OCaml site:          http://www.camlcity.org
Contact details:        http://www.camlcity.org/contact.html
Company homepage:       http://www.gerd-stolpmann.de
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