"> My impression is that INRIA is too eager to add features and tweak the language.
"That's strange. I've always had the opposite impression - that they maintain compatibility at all costs, including leaving sub-optimal APIs in the standard library."
When I started using OCaml, many standard library functions weren't tail recursive---you couldn't get the length of a list with more than ~10,000 elements, for example. The library definitely seems like an afterthought compared with the language. (And that would be why there are so many of them.)
"That's strange. I've always had the opposite impression - that they maintain compatibility at all costs, including leaving sub-optimal APIs in the standard library."
When I started using OCaml, many standard library functions weren't tail recursive---you couldn't get the length of a list with more than ~10,000 elements, for example. The library definitely seems like an afterthought compared with the language. (And that would be why there are so many of them.)