Gentlemen!

I think this might be kinda offtopic, but nevertheless. OCaml is being
extensively employed for educational purposes, and it looks like it is
still missing an important feature - the one of easy reading numbers
(integers/floats/doubles) from, say, standard input. You have to read
lines and parse numbers out of them. For instance, in Pascal it was
possible to do "read(x)". 

Absence of such feature distracts people from trying to program sensible
things in OCaml. It would be nice to have such functionality in the
standard library.

I do not wish to start a rant like "let us include simplex method in the
std since it is gravely important" etc., but I do think that _ability to
read numbers from stdin in a standard way_ is very important for the
language like OCaml - because students want it very much, and it is not
ugly in any way.

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 Serge S. Bityukov, Moscow State University, Dept of Mechanics and Mathematics