On Wed, 12 Dec 2001, Chris Hecker wrote:

>
> It does seem like there's an asymmetry in parameters versus return
> values that might be worth looking into (in languages in general, not
> just caml).  Bruce's example was interesting to me because I didn't
> know that lisp had tuples (as opposed to just lists).  That
> reintroduces the asymmetry that I'm talking about, where if everything
> was just a list (both returns and params) then it would be symmetric
> and apply would just work.  Even with tuples, lisp is still more
> symmetric since you can convert a tuple to a list generically and then
> pass it in with apply (according to Bruce's example).

I understand your point and mostly agree with it, but keep in mind that:

  let f x y = (x,y)

is not a function that takes 2 parameters. So, I would say that Caml is
symmetric if you don't curry the arguments.

Also, the style of currying everything is a little different in the SML
community. Their compilers often expect (and optimize for) multiple
parameters as tuples.

Patrick

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