> I actually don't like ambiguity between type annotation and value assignment in my records. It's clear in current OCaml that {a: int} is a type declaration an

> I actually don't like ambiguity between type annotation and value assignment in my records. It's clear in current OCaml that {a: int} is a type declaration and {a = 1} is a value declaration/assignment. Wild guess: Due to moving to a brace syntax for blocks and '=' for assignments, they needed to move to colons to disambiguate something that already used braces and '='. That is, something like this: let x = ref 0; type record = { x: int }; if (cond) { x = 1 } else { x = 2 } might read either as creating a new record value or as writing throught the reference. (Again, just a guess.) EDIT: All that said, I agree with you. OCaml's syntax is meh, but moving it closer to brace languages makes it worse, not better. Some of these changes actually move closer to Haskell (constructors without parens, yay!), and those are the changes I like.