On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 1:08 PM, Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com> wrote:
> On Tuesday 16 February 2010 16:47:03 Grant Rettke wrote:
>> On Tue, Feb 16, 2010 at 10:21 AM, Ashish Agarwal <agarwal1975@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>> > let rec
>>
>> Do OCaml'er look at let rec more as being a message to the programmer,
>> rather than the compiler, that the way I want to define this function
>> is recursively so even if 'f' was previously bound you know which one
>> I mean?
>
> I see it as resolving an ambiguity for both the programmer and compiler. There
> are alternatives as others have mentioned but none seem particularly good or
> bad to me. Moreover, the burden of "rec" is tiny so I don't think it is worth
> discussing in such detail.

It wasn't about the "burden" of having to type 4 extra characters;
rather I was trying to understand the philosophy behind the langguage.