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Comment by user2342 | Hacker News Reader

Weak arguments in the article with badly chosen examples.

If one wanted to criticize OCaml syntax, the need for .mli-files (with different syntax for function signatures) and the rather clunky module/signature syntax would be better candidates.

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I actually rather like the mli-files. It's a nice file to read, with the documentation and externally available symbols only. However, the fact that the syntax is so different is a bit annoying.

Sometimes I wrote (haven't written OCaml for some time now..) functions like:

    let foo: int -> int = fun x ->
      ..

just to make them more similar to the syntax

    val foo: int -> int

in the module types.

The problem with mli files and counter-argument to “they’re good documentation” is that, with a few visibility annotations (`pub let`, etc.) they could be auto-generated. Then you don’t have to write your entire public interface twice (sans the inferred `let` types, but I already prefer to make those explicit in the `ml` because otherwise you get much more verbose type errors when they don’t align with the `mli`).

I actully like the mli files. Its a separate place to describe the PUBLIC API, and a good place for documentarion. Now you dont clutter your code with lots of long comments and docstrings.

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