Re: [Caml-list] Snd question

[Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com>]

On Tuesday 16 August 2005 14:17, skaller wrote:
> 	match e with (h,t,...) ->

My understanding is that the types of those expressions cannot expressed in 
the OCaml type system. So that would require quite a fundamental change.

> because a tuple of all the same type is an array,
> but as yet I haven't found a way to make ... work in
> pattern matches.

My only ellipses-related gripe is that ML patterns are designed to be linear 
but it would be nice if they could perform all linear pattern matches. 
Currently, you cannot match [|1; ...|] in OCaml.

I believe the less-elegant solution "a when Array.length a > 1 && a.(0) = 1" 
will incur a significant performance penalty when used in the middle of a 
large set of unguarded patterns.

> It would actually be nice to have more general support
> for polyadic tuple management: for example thinking about
> obtaining a slice of a tuple, or concatenating two tuples,
> suggests that just getting the n'th component is special case.

From my limited experience of SML, it is more of a pain than a benefit.

-- 
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
Objective CAML for Scientists
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/ocaml_for_scientists