On Sat, Jul 23, 2005 at 09:36:47AM -0700, Stephane Glondu wrote:
> On Saturday 23 July 2005 06:16, Berke Durak wrote:
> > However I was wondering how feasible it would be to have a "any : 'a"
> > value, that would return an (unspecified) value of any given type...
> 
> That seems to be dirty and would surely beak type safety.
> 
> > This is clearly feasible for base types.
> > possible for tuples, records and functions of base types.
> 
> What do you mean?

I mean that there could be a built-in, type-safe Ocaml function that would
yield a valid, yet arbitrary value of any type.

> > Recursive values could prove problematic :
> >
> >   type stuff1 = { mutable a : stuff2 }
> >   and stuff2 = { mutable b : stuff1 }
> 
> What's the problem here? You can always define a dummy value of a given 
> type:
> 
> let rec dummy1 = { a = dummy2 } and dummy2 = { b = dummy1 }

Yes of course, but you may need to compute a path in a type dependency
graph.

> > Would it be worth the fuss ?
> 
> I think that a better design (which doesn't need such hacks) would be 
> worth.

That was my point.  You could cleanly initialize your heap with that "any"
value.
-- 
Berke Durak