Re: convincing management to switch to Ocaml

[Pierre Weis <Pierre.Weis@inria.fr>]

Hi,

As part as a discussion O'Caml versus C++, John Skaller wrote:

> OTOH, I find the ocaml precedence rules are a
> real annoyance -- I can't remember them, and I find all the brackets
> not only make code hard to read, they make it hard to write (for me).

I don't want to start a flamewar on syntax, but as a computer science
teacher and Caml implementor and designer, I'm interested at those
facts you mentioned about the syntax of the language, since I just
think the opposite way: I find the Caml precedence rules pretty
convenient, easy to teach, and fairly easy to remember since
absolutely intuitive and natural (provided they have been explained to
you and you have understood the design ideas).

So, there is something interesting to understand here, could you
elaborate a bit on your difficulties on precedences and especially
about ``all the brackets'' that make the code hard to read and hard to
write ?

Thanks in advance,

Pierre Weis

INRIA, Projet Cristal, Pierre.Weis@inria.fr, http://cristal.inria.fr/~weis/