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Date: Mon, 24 Jul 2000 22:48:20 +0200
From: Olivier Andrieu <olivier.andrieu@fnac.net>
Reply-To: andrieu@oxygene.ijm.jussieu.fr
Organization: DEA Genetique Cellulaire et Moleculaire
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To: caml-list@inria.fr
Subject: Re: automatic construction of mli files
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Julian Assange wrote:
> 
> .mli files are highly redundant. Almost without exception all, or at
> the vast majority of .mli information can be generated from the
> underlying .ml implementation. We have programming languages to reduce
> redundancy, not increase it. Keeping mli and ml files in-sync is not
> only a waste of time, but error-prone and from my survey often not
> performed correctly, particularly where consistency is not enforced by
> the compiler (e.g comments describing functions and types). While
> exactly the same problem exists in a number of other
> separate-compilation language implementations, we, as camlers, should
> strive for something better.

Urmpf. Well, it's still about type abstraction and name hiding isn't it
? The compiler can't decide for you what you want to keep in the
interface and what should be hidden.

But it's quite easy to generate an mli file with everything in it :
 ocamlc -i -c mycode.ml > mycode.mli

You could even use a Makefile rule :
%.mli : %.ml
	$(OCAMLC) -i -c $^ > $@


	Olivier.