Re: [Caml-list] First order compile time functorial polymorphism in Ocaml

["Jacques Carette" <carette@mcmaster.ca>]

John Max Skaller <skaller@ozemail.com.au> wrote:
> Jacques Carette wrote:
> Curious: how useful? How many times did you reuse it?

I've used generic_traverse in a dozen places, and will likely use it more often.

> Its a hack yes, looks ugly :(

Oh, fully agreed!  The point of posting it was to get some constructive criticism in the hopes of being able to do 
better.

> Perhaps can do better with polymorphic variants.

My first prototype (which got wiped out in some disk crash) did use polymorphic variants.  I decide to not use them 
again to see if I really needed them.  And perhaps I do.

> Ugly separating the filter
> for the special actions from those actions:

Very much so, but I found the combined filter/action routines even harder to read, with more code duplication than I 
could swallow!!  So I used this 2-stage approach.

> Uggh. Like to be writing something like
> 	| `Mlist args -> ..
> 	| `Mseq args -> ..
> 	| _ -> ..

I will re-explore this.

> or perhaps
> 	| #usual_case ->
> instead of the last line if there happens to be
> a type partition matching the requirements.

I read about #types in the Ocaml manual.  Are you referring to using classes or the (documented obsolete) expansion of 
variant types ?

Even though  S. Boulmé, Th. Hardin, and R. Rioboo in
"Polymorphic Data Types, Objects, Modules and Functors: is it too much ?" (see 
http://www.lip6.fr/reports/lip6.2000.014.html) argue quite cogently about the use of the full power of Ocaml for doing 
mathematics [my real goal], I was hoping that for writing a language interpreter I did not need to go that far.

Jacques

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