]> On Wed, 2003-10-08 at 02:37, brogoff@speakeasy.net wrote: > While it's nice to have stopgap solutions to these "problems", IMO the right > solution will be possible when we have some kind of overloading in the language. > Rather than having lots of squirrelly notations for hashtable access (and string > access, and BigArray access, and...) we should just be able to index like arrays > and be done with it. Lack of user defined overloading has always been a weak > point in the entire ML family of languages, IMO. > Felix has overloading. My feelings: lack of overloading has two advantages. (1) definiteness Its definite what you're refering to: the lookup rules are simple. Unlike overloading systems such as the lookup and overload resolution in C++. (2) prevents newbie abuse Well, I have seen so much *horrendous* C++ garbage where people thought overloading was clever. I have also seen bad consequences where more expert people constructed a badly designed mess -- such as the C++ iostream facility. They got confused, and tried to 'overload' cout << x for x being a 'character'. Only, when iostreams got templated (character type became a type parameter) it no longer made so much sense .. Yes, I miss overloading in Ocaml. But not all that much :-) ------------------- 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