Re: Question on language design (keywords vs Pervasives)

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

> Pierre wrote:
> 
> > I'm sure that there is no ``more primitive function'' than raise to
> > raise an exception. So sorry, you cannot define raise ``in terms of a
> > more primitive function'' in Caml. 
> 
> Perhaps my intent was not understood. The idea is to provide
> a primitive '_raise' construction, but provide a wrapper function
> 'raise' in the standard library which does nothing but call _raise:
> 
> 	let raise ex = _raise ex
> 
[...]

Thank you for your explanation: I can now explain the issue I was
addressing using your own terminology.

I was addressing the meaning of the basic exception raiser, the very
primitive that you named here the "primitive '_raise' construction"; I
think that the meaning of this primitive should be fixed once and for
all, and the simplest way to do so is to turn out its name into a
keyword.

(Hence, if we still give to this primitive its usual name, it suggests
to turn ``raise'' into a keyword; if we use your naming convention
then ``_raise'' should be turned into a keyword.)

Pierre Weis

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