Re: [Caml-list] Teaching bottomline, part 3: what should improve.

[tab@snarc.org (Vincent Hanquez)]

On Wed, May 23, 2007 at 09:16:44AM +1000, skaller wrote:
> On Tue, 2007-05-22 at 18:10 -0400, David Teller wrote:
> 
> > * Error messages of the type system are somewhat obscure. The reflex of
> > many students is "OCaml wants it to be of type XXX", rather than "there
> > is a contradiction in what I wrote". It would be nice if there was a way
> > to ask OCaml to display additional information on type errors.
> 
> This is a long standing peeve of mine. Lets face it: Ocaml just lies.
> If it has inferred a type, then finds a contradiction, it should
> report both the location of the contradication AND all of the source
> lines that contributed to the inference.

I agree, this is one of the worst thing about ocaml type inference,
and you sometimes end up to have to put explicit type to functions to
find the offending lines (usually hundreds lines before the actual line
that's printed), defeating the whole thing...

Cheers,
-- 
Vincent Hanquez