Re: [Caml-list] use of ";;" when teaching Ocaml

["Török Edwin" <edwin+ml-ocaml@etorok.net>]

On 06/22/2015 07:30 PM, Gerd Stolpmann wrote:
> Am Montag, den 22.06.2015, 17:07 +0100 schrieb Mark Shinwell:
>> I've heard the argument of Gerd from various people on many occasions.
>> Personally, I don't buy it; I think the situation where the error
>> message is deficient doesn't happen very often, whereas ";;" is
>> syntactic clutter that I have to see every day (and would rather not
>> see).
> 
> Note that I personally normally don't use ;; because I am very aware of
> the problem and fluent enough in the OCaml syntax to help myself. I was
> mentioning this point because beginners are not fluent, and they will
> run into the problem of getting syntax errors where everything looks
> alright.
> [...]
> As a side note, the situation would be different if the compiler emitted
> warnings about obviously wrong indentation, because the information
> where the writer thinks that a new definition begins is also already
> included in the indentation.

Although ;; was useful to me while learning OCaml, as a debugging tool for syntax errors [1],
nowadays editor support is much better (ocp-indent, ocamlmerlin) and you usually see the misplaced ; immediately
(or after reindenting the code if you made modifications).

[1] tried the revised syntax route too for a while, but since most material and examples on OCaml are about the original syntax
it was better to learn just that instead of constantly switching between the two

Best regards,
--Edwin