Re: [Caml-list] Metaprogramming features

[Jon Harrop <jonathandeanharrop@googlemail.com>]

On Saturday 04 October 2008 09:23:46 Richard Jones wrote:
> On Sat, Oct 04, 2008 at 03:03:04AM +0100, Jon Harrop wrote:
> > On Saturday 04 October 2008 01:49:08 Stefano Zacchiroli wrote:
> > > Sorry if I'm being too frank, but I don't see the usefulness of your
> > > post. I would love to see basic meta-programming feature in vanilla
> > > Caml, but the way to make it happen is for sure not lobbying / making
> > > noise.  The way is provide patches which implement the requested
> > > feature.
> >
> > If try..finally will not be accepted what makes you think that a
> > MetaOCaml patch would be accepted?
>
> Where did you post the working compiler patch that implements
> try/finally?

I asked if it would be worth doing so before I even attempted it and was told 
that it would not be worth attempting by Pierre Weis. Xavier Leroy told me 
that copyright issues in French law essentially prohibit contributions from 
non-French programmers.

> Where did you nurse the patch through many iterations, 
> as the language designers asked you to fix one thing and another,
> before the final patch was rejected?

I would like to think that the OCaml community has try..finally pinned down 
now. It is the first example on every Camlp4 tutorial after all...

I'm not saying that there is anything wrong with having a language 
implementation written by language researchers for language research but 
almost all users would benefit enormously from a variety of simple 
improvements that the community could easily implement themselves were it 
feasible to get changes absorbed upstream more quickly. Now that OCaml is 
gaining traction in industry there are also a growing number of people 
willing to throw money around to get improvements made and we could all be 
benefitting from that.

-- 
Dr Jon Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/?e