I've been reading over
http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/index.html and have learned
two things:
-lists are immutable and singly linked, which explains why 1::[2;3] is
valid while [2,3]::1 is not, and why its efficient.
-the proper way to ensure tail-recursive optimization

question: are these and other optimizations documented somewhere
officially? I find it a little uncomfortable I've been learning OCaml
without knowning such internal details. Any secrets I should definitely
know if I were to use this language in production?

thanks, 
Tato Thetza