[Caml-list] Why aren't OCaml constructors functions?

[Kristopher Micinski <micinski@cs.umd.edu>]

This is an obvious question with an answer that is nonobvious to me.

One potential reason I could believe is that it might be a performance
optimization to ensure that all constructors were known to be fully
applied when used.  But that seems unnecessary: a simple rewrite rule
(even syntactic) would likely fix this for the majority of cases.
This leads me to believe it isn't the reason.

Another reason might be to avoid potential name clashes.  I typically
name constructors things that might also be reasonable function names,
but not often.

I've done a fair amount of googling on this and can't find any threads
on this, searching back through this list down to 2012.  It's possible
I missed something.

Kris