As a big Ocaml fan, the syntax is one of my least favourite aspects of the language.

Two things that I find particularly annoying are constructors (which don't have the same syntax as funciton calls) and the multitude of shift-reduce ambiguities that don't do the thing that you want. For example, in the following code the W gets parsed as part of the inner match:

    match foo with
      | X -> match bar with
               | Y -> 1
               | Z -> 2
      | W -> 3

A lot of this could be remedied by having more expression terminators. ReasonML uses C-like curly braces but even a simple "end" token to close the match expressoin (similar to what Lua does) would already be enough.

This tripped me up when I was first exploring OCaml. FWIW i've taken to wrapping the nested matches with parenthesis or a begin/end

    match foo with
      | X -> (match bar with
               | Y -> 1
               | Z -> 2)
      | W -> 3

    match foo with
      | X -> begin match bar with
               | Y -> 1
               | Z -> 2
             end
      | W -> 3

The indentation sensitive syntax of F# was the solution to me, I would love to see it being integrated into OCaml.

Ohh interesting. Didn't get that far yet. But good to know. Is there somekind of place listing these gotchas with the syntax? Seems something good to be aware.

Check out the point "comparison to ocaml" in the reasonml docs