On Saturday, 22 March 2014 at 16:28:11 UTC, Paulo Pinto wrote:
When F# was still in beta, it had OCaml syntax as default with
a significant whitespace mode that could be turned on with a
compiler directive "#light on".
While asking the embryonic F# community which mode should be
the default.
The significant whitespace mode won and became the default,
with the
OCaml mode being the optional one.
That's not too hard to believe. I like OCaml a lot but its syntax
is not its best feature. The OCaml preprocessor (CamlP4) had an
improved syntax called Revised as one of its applications. As I
recall, Gerard Huet (who publicized 'the zipper') used a subset
of Revised he called Pidgin ML in his publications. They looked a
lot nicer than regular OCaml.
I've never written any F#, since I live in the world of Unix, and
never visit Windows. It looks like it has some interesting
improvements over OCaml (let!, async stuff, LINQ, some
overloading, ...) but has a weak module system compared to OCaml.
