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?

> 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 }

> Would it be worth the fuss ?

I think that a better design (which doesn't need such hacks) would be 
worth.


Stephane Glondu.