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 LAA11194 for caml-red; Tue, 22 Aug 2000 11:31:35 +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 LAA12077 for ; Tue, 22 Aug 2000 11:08:30 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from pauillac.inria.fr (pauillac.inria.fr [128.93.11.35]) by concorde.inria.fr (8.10.0/8.10.0) with ESMTP id e7M98PT07516; Tue, 22 Aug 2000 11:08:25 +0200 (MET DST) Received: (from weis@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id LAA11231; Tue, 22 Aug 2000 11:08:25 +0200 (MET DST) From: Pierre Weis Message-Id: <200008220908.LAA11231@pauillac.inria.fr> Subject: Re: Question on language design (keywords vs Pervasives) In-Reply-To: <39A1E4B1.1D243ECE@maxtal.com.au> from John Max Skaller at "Aug 22, 100 12:25:53 pm" To: skaller@maxtal.com.au (John Max Skaller) Date: Tue, 22 Aug 2000 11:08:25 +0200 (MET DST) Cc: caml-list@inria.fr X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL28 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: weis@pauillac.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/