The use of CamelCase in OCaml

[jbe]

@xavierleroy

The compiler will look for a file named SomeModule.ml first, then try someModule.ml.

Oh, I somehow missed that. Thanks for letting me know. Interestingly, looking into the OCaml stdlib source code here, I do see the use of lowercase filenames. I guess it can be handy to have ALLCAPS files such as GUIDELINES.md or other capitalized file names like Makefile to appear at the beginning of a listing, followed by all regular modules.

But this is still not clear to me:

@jbe

Not sure how this behaves on systems with case-insensitive file systems, e.g. if you have two modules: NoBody and Nobody. On Windows, would these both be expected in a file named NOBODY.ML (case insensitive)?

Do I have to avoid distinguishing module names only by capitalization? This would (in theory) be an argument against CamelCase because NoBody and Nobody couldn’t coexist (when using modules in seperate files on a case-insensitive file system), but No_body and Nobody could.

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Update:

I found this response in another thread:

@dbuenzli

@perry

Is inserting a capital into a file name reliable given that many non-Unix operating systems don’t deal very intelligently with case distinctions?

I think this has been used many times by projects without problems. I don’t think you’ll run into one as long as you don’t try to have both foobar.ml and fooBar.ml (this wouldn’t work on macos’ case insensitive file system).