Hi Ramana,

| I would be glad to see an update to HOL Light (mainly the Makefile and
| some pa_j_xxx.ml) such that it builds smoothly with the latest OCaml
| (3.12.1) and Camlp4.

This would certainly be very nice. It is probably not difficult in
principle to switch to using camlp4. However, when the dramatic change
to camlp4 happened in OCaml 3.10, the new camlp4 was completely
undocumented, which is why I switched to camlp5. Perhaps things have
improved since then.

Adding basic syntax extensions like extra infixes, "it" and quotations
is probably pretty easy (though quotations seem a bit more complicated
in the new camlp4, requiring you to do work to get the content simply
as a string). The complications may come with the lexical changes,
the different case conventions and the use of `...` instead of <<...>>
for quotations. Here camlp5 is not very satisfactory either: it seems
that the only way to change the lexer is basically to copy the
existing one and modify it, which is why the pa_j files are so
hideous and camlp5-version-dependent.

Anyway, I would be very happy if someone else feels like doing this. I
doubt if I will get to it very soon myself, even though I understand
the inconvenience it causes.

On Phil's original problem that the HOL Light case conventions are
incompatible with CamelCase identifiers as constructors or module
names, such names are not used much in HOL Light (or in core OCaml
libraries as far as I can see), so there would be no great problem
with modifying the case conventions a bit. Also, as Phil may already
know, you can temporarily knock out and restore the lexical changes
by:

 unset_jrh_lexer;;

 .... stuff using conventional OCaml lexing ....

 set_jrh_lexer;;

Using this sort of bracketing, one may be able to encapsulate the
Batteries calls one needs.

John.

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