Notes (OFVB 14/31): The Other Numbers
Okay, here’s one thing I find a little strange. Tuples are to be polymorphic with respect to each element (so (a,b) is the product of a and b). In Haskell, if we want a monomorphic pair, we can either make an (a,a) tuple, or better yet we declare a type constructor:
data Pair a = Pair a a`.But in OCaml, we’re limited to doing:
type 'a pair = Pair of 'a * 'aBut when we want to make a Pair in OCaml, we write Pair (1,2) with syntax that looks like tuples, vs Haskell’s Pair 1 2.
I wonder if this is because OCaml only has rank-1 parametric polymorphism, since the Pair constructor can’t be partially applied like it can in Haskell:
> data Pair a = Pair a a
> :t Pair 'c'
Pair 'c' :: Char -> Pair CharWe can make a function in OCaml that mimics this:
type 'a pair' = Pair of 'a * 'a
# fun x -> Pair ('c',x);;
- : char -> char pair' = <fun>Actually, I think that specific example is due to OCaml being strict and Haskell being lazy. The difference in parametric polymorphism rank is:
> data Pair a b = Pair a b
> :k Pair
Pair :: * -> * -> *
> :t Pair 'c'
Pair 'c' :: b -> Pair Char b
> type PairOfChar = Pair Char
> :k PairOfChar
* -> *And in Ocaml:
# type ('a,'b) pair' = Pair of 'a * 'b;;
type nonrec ('a, 'b) pair' = Pair of 'a * 'b
# type 'a pairOfChar = PairOfChar of char * 'a ;;
type 'a pairOfChar = PairOfChar of char * 'aSo very similar! Except all kinds in Ocaml are * -> * and higher-rank polymorphism is simulatedc with (*, *) -> * instead of * -> * -> *
Are we seriously using +. for floating point addition? Really? There isn’t some way to overload + to do what we want? smh, OCaml.
Questions
5
I dislike how IO heavy this exercise is. Like, I guess I could do this in a totally pure way with recursion, but the language really seems to want to make it easy to use refs and loops more than making it easy to recurse.
I ran into an Invalid argument: Bytes.create exception, and it was rather unclear at first why that would be. Apparently, String.make uses Bytes.create under the hood, but this was not apparent from the exception.
OCaml seems focused on using exceptions to communicate issues rather than using types.