Re: Overloading again (Was Re: [Caml-list] Interfacing C++ and Ocaml)

[Hao-yang Wang <hywang@pobox.com>]

>An even longer time ago I asked about overloading and got a nice long
>reply from Francois Rouaix, describing the history of overloading in Caml
>and ending with something like "Jun Furuse is now working on it". You can
>read about the latest incarnation of his work by going to 
>
>http://pauillac.inria.fr/jfla/2001/actes/index.html
>
>and downloading 
>
>Generic Polymorphism in ML
>
>which as you can guess is in English unlike his paper last year. 
>
>I'd also love to know if and when this will make it into Ocaml since this
>is one of the few things that I dislike about ML style languages and
>even after quite a bit of Caml programming I still miss overloading. 
>
>-- Brian


Well, I re-read Francois Rouaix's long email, and at the end he said:
>In this type system, we still have static type-checking and inference,
>but there are some practical problems: coherence (as always when you do
>powerful overloading), true separate compilation, but more significantly,
>you have to define all "instances" of an overloaded function in a single
>"generic" definition. In most cases, this is not what the user wants.

>From Jun Furuse's paper, it seems that we still have to define all 
"instances" of an overloaded function in a single generic" definition. If 
so, we cannot extend an existing function/operator, such as (+), to 
parameters of new types.

Is this true, or did I miss something in Jun's paper?

Cheers,
Hao-yang Wang
-------------------
To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr.  Archives: http://caml.inria.fr