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by flohofwoe 885 days ago
Might not be a popular opinion, but I actually like that C headers only contain the public API declaration of a "module" while the implementation and private declarations live in a separate file. Makes it easy to figure out the public API just by reading the header and without having to sift through unimportant implementation code.

In other languages you need IDE support for extracting the public API of a module.
1 comments
lifthrasiir 884 days ago
That's orthogonal to the module system. OCaml for example has `.ml` and `.mli` files for the same purpose, but `.mli` can be automatically generated from `.ml` if you want. And that's absolutely nothing to do with OCaml's great module system.
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flohofwoe 884 days ago
Does the .mli file preserve documentation comments? IMHO the header file should be written for human consumption first. Documenting the implementation isn't by far as important.
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lifthrasiir 884 days ago
The main OCaml implementation doesn't, but I believe there are several third-party tools that automate this. And as you've mentioned, comments in `.ml` and `.mli` do tend to differ, so even the default auto-generation may be useful because it will do as many jobs as possible without a human intervention.
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