Comment author: ertai

Would love to have it too. Simple and useful.

Comment author: @johnwhitington

Make use of the fact that & is deprecated for logical AND and write:

let ( & ) a b = a b

You can then write

f a b & g c & h 0

or whatever. Also, it can be read as "and" as in "reverse and flatten and fold" etc.

Comment author: ertai

Cool, thanks for the solution...

Will using it from now and kill some parentheses :)

Comment author: @dbuenzli

I really like it aswell, can make some code much clearer. Would be nice if the fun call could be optimized away.

Daniel

Comment author: ertai

Here is a bit of Camlp4 (compile with the version from CVS) to do that:

$ cat pa_app.ml
open Camlp4.PreCast;
AstFilters.register_str_item_filter
(Ast.map_expr
(fun
[ <:expr@loc< & $e1$ $e2$ >> -> <:expr@loc< $e1$ $e2$ >>
| e -> e ]))#str_item;

$ ocamlc -pp camlp4rf -c -I +camlp4 pa_app.ml
$ camlp4o ./pa_app.cmo -str "f a b & g c & h 0"
f a b (g c (h 0))

Comment author: @lefessan

This feature was implemented by Xavier Clerc in 3.12.1+dev and I backported it to trunk in commit r12070.

Comment author: jessicah

Can the feature also include defining the actual function/operator, not just the compiler primitive? From what I've been able to see, one hasn't been defined in pervasives.

And whilst (&) is deprecated, I'd recommend against using this, as it conflicts with jocaml.

Is there any reason ocaml can't add the ($) operator (and change the needed precedence/associativity rules)?

Comment author: @garrigue

There is a very good reason not to change the associativity for ($):
lots of people already use it in their code, for various applications.
It has the right associativity if you use it for left-to-right composition
for instance.
Moreover, $ is used by camlp4, so it cannot be reserved for something else.
If you are ready to use 2-character combinations, there are plenty of possibilities.