Re: [Caml-list] Type inference problem

[Brian Hurt <bhurt@spnz.org>]

On Tue, 1 Nov 2005, Jonathan Roewen wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I can't figure out what's wrong with my code =(
>
> It's on a paste site, so will only last about 24 hours or so.
> http://rafb.net/paste/results/Uux57B97.html
>
> jonathan@moonbeam:~/dst/stdlib$ ocamlc VFS.ml
> File "VFS.ml", line 106, characters 3-6:
> This expression has type int but is here used with type unit
>
> It -has- to return int ;-) But I have no idea where the type
> constraint is coming from that wants it to return unit. Change it to
> return unit, and where it's used complains it doesn't return type int
> (so that constraint is correct).

A general tactic I use in cases like this is to add type annotations. 
What is almost certainly happening is that somewhere else before this line 
in your code you are returning unit as a value, so Ocaml thinks it's 
supposed to return unit.  If you add a type annotation to explicitly state 
that it returns int, Ocaml will instead give an error where you return 
unit, allowing you to fix the problem.

Brian