]> William Lovas <wlovas@stwing.upenn.edu> writes: > Mmm, this certainly is a useful use of polymorphism without parametrized, > types, but the challenge i was trying to propose was more to the spirit of > the original 'a -> 'a theorem: by "useful function that operates on just > 'a's", what i meant was essentially "a non-trivial function of type > 'a -> 'a", which is (i hope) a significantly more difficult challenge :) > > Polymorphism as used in `raise' and `ignore' strikes me as more language > magic than anything else -- although useful in practice, i have a strong > intuition that from a certain theoretical perspective, namely that of > purely functional languages, they're not so interesting. So, to clarify, > while they are practical uses of polymorphism, they're not what i had in > mind when i wrote the above paragraph. Well, the ignore function is just an example of a constant function, that may be of some interest in some case. The raise function is more complex as it use exception that are a difficult matter in purely functional languages. But I remember to have seen a try to add exception to Haskell, so there might be intersting too. -- Rémi Vanicat vanicat@labri.u-bordeaux.fr http://dept-info.labri.u-bordeaux.fr/~vanicat ------------------- To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/ Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners