On Fri, 22 Jan 1999, Pierre Weis wrote:

> > 	Why is there no creation function which does not take a default
> > value for filling the array?
> [...]
> > 
> > -- Brian
> 
> This is due to the coexistance in Caml of polymorphism and mutable
> values. The system would be unsafe if we were able to allocate
> polymorphic mutable values (those mutable values could be filled
> afterwards with values of unrelated types, and hence would break the
> homogeneous sequence nature of arrays, and then may be read back with
> types unrelated to their proper types).

Other reason for immediate arrays initialization is garbage collection, I
think.

Anton