hubFS: THE place for F#

A few questions about F#.

1) I am not sure whether or not it is possible to hide certain fields or members in F# e.g. using private and protected keywords.

2) Is it possible to have a static field in a class? Even in a non object oriented framework, this is useful in a number of cases. e.g. storing the previous seed in a random number generator, unique id generator. In an object oriented framework, this could be used to implement the Singleton pattern. If not, is there a standard way to implement using the FP approach.

I appreciate your thoughts on the matter. Thanks in advance.

Regards

Chris

Hi Chris,

You should use signatures to hide things.  See http://research.microsoft.com/fsharp/manual/quicktour.aspx#QuickTourSignatures and the several examples of signatures in the *.fsi and *.mli files in the samples in the distribution.

Signatures are great for functional programming, or when the interface to a module is thin, but can be a bit less satisfying for metadata-rich OO programming, where you can end up with lots of duplication between implementation and signature.  We're currently looking into modifying the signature mechanism, partly through a "private" keyword, and partly by allowing signature declarations ("module types") inline in implementation files.

Cheers!

Don