Undefined evaluation order

[Brian Rogoff <bpr@best.com>]

Hi,
    It is well known that OCaml has undefined evaluation orders and that
it uses right-to-left ordering. What is the rationale for that decision? 
I remember some discussion of this but I couldn't find it in the Caml list
archives. 

    Besides being surprising for lots of people, it is actually a little
ugly to have to write explicit let bindings to force the order and when
reading files which consist of long records; for instance I much prefer 

type date =
  { year : int
  ; month : int
  ; day : int
  ; hour : int
  ; minute : int
  ; second : int 
  }

let input_date igds =
  { year = input_word igds
  ; month = input_word igds
  ; day = input_word igds
  ; hour = input_word igds
  ; minute = input_word igds
  ; second = input_word igds
  }

to 

let input_date igds =
  let year = input_word igds in
  let month = input_word igds in
  let day = input_word igds in
  let hour = input_word igds in
  let minute = input_word igds in
  let second = input_word igds in
  {  year = year
   ; month = month
   ; day = day
   ; hour = hour
   ; minute = minute
   ; second = second
   }

or even with right-to-left where the order is exactly the opposite of the 
record definition (and of what most readers expect). 

-- Brian