2008/2/5 Damien Guichard <alphablock@orange.fr>:
> And the answer is: OCaml variants are certainly treated as an initial
> algebra, but not exactly as an enumeration, thus their relative order is not
> meaningfull to the compare function.

Actually it *is* meaningful, but as Berke pointed out, constant
constructors and variant expecting some arguments are treated (and
ordered) separately.
This is explained in detail in Sec. 18.3.4 of the manual
[http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/manual032.html], and this
is why adding dummy arguments of type unit does the trick.
My point is that it's not as bad as it looks, since you have a way to
"control" (or at least predict) what the order between your different
values will be. This is a difference with polymorphic variants for
instance.
--
Stéphane L.
http://www.lri.fr/~lescuyer