I'm amazed this hasn't been asked yet, but maybe my search fu just isn't up to the task.

In C, you had to have prototypes for functions so the compiler (which was apparently as dumb as a brick) could deal with functions calling other functions before those other functions had been defined. I'm getting an error that makes me think that's the problem, but I can't possibly believe that.

1

c:\match.ml(35,18): error: FS0039: The value or constructor 'matchPattern' is not defined.

The two functions have cases where one will have to call the other, so I'm stumped as to how one deals with this. I was under the impression it would (like C#) be smart enough to make sure the other functions weren't later in the file before fussing at me. Am I missing something little?

I get the feeling the questions I'm asking are far more fundamental than the other questions being asked around here, but nothing I've found to read thus far has had anything this low level. Everything deals with really (to me) esoteric concepts of patterns, decomposition, and the like, but there doesn't seem to an "F# for Dummies Who Apparently Can't Grasp Functional Programming", which would ideally discuss the kind of thing the average programmer does in a standard imperative language like C, Java, C#, or whatever, since using the assumptions you get from years of those languages will yield a debilitating aneurysm within moments of trying to get an element out of a list.

DC