4 ms·

I've worked quite a bit with OCaml and one of the first stumbling blocks was its strictness when it comes to number literals and even operators. In OCaml, 1 + 1

• tremon 5y ago
  In OCaml, 1.0 + 1.0 isn't even well-typed. You don't need to mix operand types to run into walls with OCaml. The lack of operator overloading may not hurt much in practice, but doesn't scream "elegant solution" to me. Haskell doesn't overload its operators either (in the sense of there being multiple definitions with different type signatures); instead, it has a working type hierarchy that allows the same arithmetic operators to be used for all numeric types (through Num->Integral, Num->Real, Num->Rational and even Num->RealFloat->Complex). (1::Int) + 1.0 isn't well-typed in Haskell either, but at least (a + b) is a valid operation for all numeric data types. And, most importantly, as a developer you can define your own types that also implement these same operators. OCaml does have polymorphic literals too: "%s" can be both type string and type formatter. It's just very limited and requires built-in compiler support, so it's not something you as developer can take advantage of in your own code. Although in practice I use OCaml more than Haskell, there's many times in OCaml where I wish it had more of Haskell's expressive type system.