[MLton] the syntax of MLBs
Matthew Fluet
fluet@cs.cornell.edu
Thu, 16 Sep 2004 22:18:32 -0400 (EDT)
> 1. It seems that there is no way to include a file name with a space
> in it. This is bad. One way to fix this would be to put filenames
> in double quotes, and use the same lexical rules as for SML
> strings.
Using quotes (and keywords) for every file seems like a lot of syntactic
noise. I'd prefer the convention used most everywhere else (e.g,
Makefiles, shells) of filenames not in quotes unless you need special
chars or spaces.
> 2. I wonder if we went overboard with my goal of making a list of
> files be a valid mlb. Would it perhaps be better or clearer if we
> had a keyword to import files. We could use "include", "require",
> "import" (although that's not so good because of _import), or
> something else.
I don't think it is significantly better. True, we have some restrictions
right now -- every file must have an extension, and we determine whether
it is sml or mlb based on the extension. (Of course, the compiler proper
does this as well; there's no way to force compilation of foo.txt as if it
were an sml file).
> 3. I wonder if we should emphasize the different treatment of
> .sml files and .mlb files using different keywords. Perhaps we
> should write
If you're going to be explicit, then you should make this distinction. I
wouldn't use "open". "include" seems right for sml files. I don;t know
about the mlb files.
However, I don't really think this improves anything that much.