From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from weis@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id KAA27831 for caml-redistribution@pauillac.inria.fr; Fri, 17 Mar 2000 10:03:53 +0100 (MET) Resent-Message-Id: <200003170903.KAA27831@pauillac.inria.fr> Received: from nez-perce.inria.fr (nez-perce.inria.fr [192.93.2.78]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id XAA30412 for ; Wed, 15 Mar 2000 23:18:43 +0100 (MET) Received: from suburbia.net (suburbia.net [203.4.184.1]) by nez-perce.inria.fr (8.8.7/8.8.7) with ESMTP id XAA27136 for ; Wed, 15 Mar 2000 23:18:24 +0100 (MET) Received: by suburbia.net (Postfix, from userid 110) id 7DB886C68A; Thu, 16 Mar 2000 09:18:04 +1100 (EST) Sender: proff@suburbia.net To: Jym Cc: Caml mailing list Subject: Re: let ... in layout References: Cc: proff@iq.org From: Julian Assange Date: 16 Mar 2000 09:18:04 +1100 In-Reply-To: Jean-Yves Moyen's message of "Wed, 15 Mar 2000 09:22:34 +0100 (MET)" Message-ID: User-Agent: Gnus/5.0802 (Gnus v5.8.2) XEmacs/21.1 (Big Bend) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Resent-From: weis@pauillac.inria.fr Resent-Date: Fri, 17 Mar 2000 10:03:53 +0100 Resent-To: caml-redistribution@pauillac.inria.fr Jean-Yves Moyen writes: > let f a b c= > match a,b,c with > ... > > which allows you to match several arguments at once. Sure, but let f a b c = match a,b,c with 0,1,2 -> 3 is a lot more cluttered than f 0 1 2 = 3 This wouldn't really be an issue except that pattern matching is so common. Intuitive brevity (as opposed to the brevity represented by languages such as perl) is what makes both haskell and *ml so readable. While both functions seem equally readable because they are both small, once you have a screen full of them there is a significant difference in clarity. Cheers, Julian.