I don't agree with the philosophy here. There are a number of differences between Poly/ML and SML/NJ (in particular the latter's weak handling of overloading), all connected with omissions from the formal definition. Such examples could be used to inform students of how quickly incompatibilities emerge when a specification is weak. Then they are ready to see how much worse it is with C.
I don't see why that example is necessary for teaching students programming, except concerning the specific issue of the need for a formal semantics to avoid such incompatibilities. Larry Paulson On 20 Sep 2012, at 08:20, Lars-Henrik Eriksson <[email protected]> wrote: > I believe that the stand-alone behavior is the reasonable one -- it also > agrees with SML/NJ and Moscow ML. > > Does this cause problems? Yes, for me it does. We use ML in the introductory > programming course for CS majors and it causes unnecessary complications for > the students. _______________________________________________ polyml mailing list [email protected] http://lists.inf.ed.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/polyml
