]> Benjamin Pierce did a nice talk at ICFP a couple of years ago about sophisticated module systems, examining where (or if) they are really needed. The slides are at http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~bcpierce/papers/modules-icfp.ps This is not exactly on target for your point about ease-of-use, but it's related. Mike On Fri, 2003-11-07 at 06:39, Yaron M. Minsky wrote: > On Fri, 2003-11-07 at 03:27, Jean-Christophe Filliatre wrote: > > [ Some discussion of methods for building maps without functors ] > > > > (But the functorial interface is definitely the best, of course.) > > I don't understand this perspective at all. Functors seem like a fairly > problematic corner of the language. In this case, except for some > possible efficiency issues, it seems clear that a non-functorial map is > preferable, for simplicity and ease-of-use issues, and performance > aside, I can't see much to recommend the current functorial approach. > > Functors would be a lot more useful if they could be used as a > large-scale structural tool. Sadly, the current implementation makes > this quite difficult, since there's no good way of parameterizing > multiple modules at once (as noted in a previous thread. See > > http://groups.google.com/groups?q=group%3Afa.caml+functors+yminsky&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en&btnG=Google+Search > > for details.) For most situations where you'd really need them, they're > not powerful enough. And for the situations where they're powerful > enough, they're usually overkill. Map and Set are examples where they > almost strictly get in the way. > > y -- Michael Hicks <mwh@cs.umd.edu> ------------------- 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