Re: [Caml-list] OCaml troll on Slashdot

["Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk" <qrczak@knm.org.pl>]

brogoff <brogoff@speakeasy.net> writes:

> Also, as I state above, the number is arbitrary, and having OCaml
> choke at some particular size rather than letting me use large lists
> violates that least surprise principle. I had an offline discussion
> recently with another caml-list person in which he told me that he
> wished OCaml used Bignums instead of int's by default. I disagree,
> but I don't think it's a dumb idea. The behavior of the standard
> List functions is worse IMO. Maybe the standard Lisp.map should be
> named List.unsafe_map (1/2 :-))?

It's not the fault of the mapping function but of the stack being
non-extensible. A user-written recursion can blow it too. Functional
programming is supposed to encourage recursion, and a non-tail-recursive
'map' is much more readable than alternatives.

My implementation of my language Kogut has extensible stack.
And transparent bignums when appropriate. Yes, it's slower,
but correctness is more important.

-- 
   __("<         Marcin Kowalczyk
   \__/       qrczak@knm.org.pl
    ^^     http://qrnik.knm.org.pl/~qrczak/