Hacker News Reader

Comment by fny | Hacker News Reader

I've tried in Rust, and it requires a return definition, as do most mainstream functional languages.

Also, mainstream functional languages aren't truly mainstream: I'd struggle to find devs who could help me in consulting gigs.

View on HN

I'm pretty sure that's just "administrative" and imposed by the syntax (e.g. think Java/C++ function declaration syntax), instead of being something the compiler can't infer. Thanks for clearing this up, though.

It was a design decision, yes. We could infer them if we wanted to, but we don't.

    let rec factorial n = 
        if n = 0 || n = 1 then 1 
        else n * factorial (n - 1)

Haskell:

  factorial n =
    if n < 2 
      then 1
      else n * factorial (n - 1)

I think the OCaml version will look almost exactly like the F# one.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com