On Friday, Apr 25, 2003, at 18:46 Europe/Helsinki, Brian Hurt wrote:
> This is usefull for two reasons, in my experience: sometimes, it lets 
> the
> compiler produce better code (for example, consider the function:
> let foo x y = x == y
> If you know that x and y will always be integers, doing:
> let foo (x:int) (y:int) = x == y
> allows the compiler to inline integer equals, rather than calling the
> generic compare function- much faster).

Actually, this is not true for your example, since you're comparing 
physical equality.  Comparing physical equality (==, !=) is always 
efficient.  Structural equality (=, <>) and order (>, >=, <, <=) will 
require calls to generic functions for unknown or indirect types.

This is equivalent to eq? vs. equal? in Scheme, but there is no 
non-traversing middle case similar to eqv?.

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