Re: to have labels or not

From: Brian Rogoff (bpr@best.com)
Date: Sun Mar 19 2000 - 05:39:13 MET

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    On Fri, 17 Mar 2000, Jan Brosius wrote:
    > My personal choice is not to use labels at all because it makes the readable
    > code too big, it is better I think to use meaningful words and within
    > comments to clarify the types of the functions.

    I don't believe this argument. I got the labeled and nonlabeled
    versions of Markus Mottl's PCRE library and looked at their respective
    sizes; the labeled versions had significantly less code (10-20% I think)
    than the unlabeled. It also dealt better with that name mess caused by
    optional parameters in the old PCRE interface causing it to read better
    IMO.

    I agree that labels seem heavy for some uses, and depending on your coding
    style they may not be for you.

    Making the labels single letter names seems like a bad idea. How do we
    distinguish "file" and "function" for example? I like "fn" but "func" is
    OK too.

    I like ":", and I'm not sure I want to give up $, %, or & for labels. Its
    nice to be able to use these as infixes, whether or not infixes are good
    for programming-in-the-large.

    I also agree that the error messages are difficult, but that's orthogonal
    to labels, call it the "price of type inference".

    Whatever happened to those other O'Labl features that haven't made it into
    OCaml yet? In particular, polymorphic methods.

    > I think I would never use the "label on " option.

    Never say never.

    > function x -> .. could be shortened by : \x ->..... I think and the use
    > of [`a] instead of `a list and the use of list comprensions as in Haskell
    > could shorten the readable code and maintain readability.

    Actually `a is another issue, and elsewhere it was rightly suggested that
    it be made illegal ;-). OK, seriously, you can use CamlP4 to get
    comprehension syntax, and but it doesn't work yet with labels so you
    won't have a chance to try them if you need P4.

    -- Brian



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