From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from weis@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id PAA23286 for caml-redistribution; Mon, 30 Aug 1999 15:55:12 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from concorde.inria.fr (concorde.inria.fr [192.93.2.39]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id KAA20676 for ; Mon, 30 Aug 1999 10:03:02 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from pauillac.inria.fr (pauillac.inria.fr [128.93.11.35]) by concorde.inria.fr (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id KAA08693; Mon, 30 Aug 1999 10:02:52 +0200 (MET DST) Received: (from weis@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id KAA15269; Mon, 30 Aug 1999 10:02:52 +0200 (MET DST) From: Pierre Weis Message-Id: <199908300802.KAA15269@pauillac.inria.fr> Subject: Re: convincing management to switch to Ocaml To: skaller@maxtal.com.au (John Skaller) Date: Mon, 30 Aug 1999 10:02:52 +0200 (MET DST) Cc: caml-list@inria.fr In-Reply-To: <37C661C2.D374D8F9@ps.uni-sb.de> from "Andreas Rossberg" at Aug 27, 99 12:00:34 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24 ME8] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: weis 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/