Thanks for all those hints. For the future I will use the beginners 
list, thank you.
But that seams really strange not to have a strictly defined order of 
evaluation. Isn't that really bad if one would like to do some tail 
recursion to get it compiled without recursion but as a loop?

Thanks and cheers,

Chris

Jacques Garrigue wrote:

>From: christian konrad <konrad@in.tum.de>
>
>  
>
>>I'm doing that:
>>
>>let _ =
>>  try
>>   let infile = open_in !filename in
>>   let rec readIn () =
>>      try
>>         (input_line infile) ^ readIn();
>>      with ee -> "";
>>   in
>>    print_string(readIn () );
>>   "good";
>>  with e -> "";;
>>
>>So why don't I get any output at all? Doesn't "with" erease the raised 
>>Exception?
>>    
>>
>
>Because you assume wrongly that input_line will be called before the
>recursive call to readIn. Nothing in the ocaml specification says so
>(evaluation order is left undefined.) In practice the rightmost call
>is done first, which is the recursive call here, but you shouldn't
>depend on it either.
>By the way, it is a bad idea to catch all exceptions. ee should be
>End_of_file and e should be Sys_error _.
>
>Jacques Garrigue
>
>  
>