On Tuesday 20 January 2004 19:34, you wrote:
> Haskell is lazy, ocaml is strict. Consider following snippet of
> ``ocaml'':
>
> let _ = f (x)
>   where x = g ()
>
> Now, the reader of the code might take false impression that f() is
> executed before g(). Of course there is no such danger with function
> definitions in where blocks, but still I think readability is the reason
> it is absent from ocaml.

Such a reader would be equally confused by let blocks. The order of execution 
is hardly the concern here.

I don't think the problem you mention has much to do with where syntax. Its 
semantics is quite independent of evaluation strategy! (Plus, you can write 
monadic code in Haskell, which is basically safe imperative code... and you 
can use strictness where appropriate)

That is quite possibly one of the most elegant features of Haskell syntax (not 
semantics) It helps balance scopes inside a function definition, actually 
*improving* readability.

Regards,

-- 
Eray Ozkural (exa) <erayo@cs.bilkent.edu.tr>
Comp. Sci. Dept., Bilkent University, Ankara  KDE Project: http://www.kde.org
www: http://www.cs.bilkent.edu.tr/~erayo  Malfunction: http://mp3.com/ariza
GPG public key fingerprint: 360C 852F 88B0 A745 F31B  EA0F 7C07 AE16 874D 539C

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