From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from weis@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.6.10/8.6.6) id KAA16336 for caml-redistribution; Wed, 15 May 1996 10:32:42 +0200 Received: from concorde.inria.fr (concorde.inria.fr [192.93.2.39]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.6.10/8.6.6) with ESMTP id AAA09981 for ; Wed, 15 May 1996 00:53:41 +0200 Received: from gemsgw.med.ge.com ([192.88.230.10]) by concorde.inria.fr (8.7.1/8.7.1) with SMTP id AAA14425 for ; Wed, 15 May 1996 00:53:40 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from gemed.med.ge.com (gemed.med.ge.com [3.7.12.4]) by gemsgw.med.ge.com (8.6.12/8.6.12) with ESMTP id RAA27844; Tue, 14 May 1996 17:51:55 -0500 Received: from nmri.med.ge.com (snap.med.ge.com [3.57.196.10]) by gemed.med.ge.com (8.6.12/8.6.12) with SMTP id RAA24191; Tue, 14 May 1996 17:54:28 -0500 Received: from swag.med.ge.com by nmri.med.ge.com (4.1/SMI-4.1) id AA07160; Tue, 14 May 96 15:55:31 PDT Received: by swag.med.ge.com (5.x/SMI-SVR4) id AA13681; Tue, 14 May 1996 15:50:59 -0700 Date: Tue, 14 May 1996 15:50:59 -0700 From: gurr@snap.med.ge.com (David Gurr) Message-Id: <9605142250.AA13681@swag.med.ge.com> To: chet@watson.ibm.com, caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Subject: Re: Class variables in O'Caml X-Sun-Charset: US-ASCII Sender: weis Chet Murthy : > Class variables are valuable syntactic sugar, because they group the > mutable, but shared, state of a class together, in a way which is > difficult for a naive programmer to ignore. "mutable, but shared, state of a class" sounds wrong. How about "mutable shared state of instances of a class" or "mutable state of a class"? The latter is simply a slot of a class object. The former is a limited form of delegation. What ever would be desired for the commercial sector, please stick to the pedantic tradition of ML and give extensions a coherent semantics. -D