On Aug 19, 10:46 am, John Carr <j...@MIT.EDU> wrote:
> OCaml has a badly designed syntax processed by a badly implemented
> parser feeding into a backend that generates poor error messages.
> All this makes the language hard to use.

I think the bad error messages break down into two categories most of the
time, 1) lengthy, unintelligible type mismatches and 2) unhelpful
(location-wise) complaints about parentheses in nested expressions. I find
that ocaml+twt helps immensely with the latter category. Basically, I'm much
much happier with the language since doing TWT - I don't have to pull my
hair out fixing things that are obvious from the indentation anyway. And,
mostly just to make a point, it does away with the fugly ;;

It's been a while since PL class so I'm not sure what can be done to make
type mismatch errors more helpful.