[GD-General] Objective Caml (was Ruby opinions)

[Patrick M D. <pa...@wa...>]

On Sat, 22 Dec 2001, Brian Hook wrote:

> Oh, and if anyone has opinions on BETA or OCaml, I'm all ears =)

Sure, I'll be an OCaml advocate for you.  I've been using it for years and
feel I had a good understanding of its strengths and weaknesses. Here are
some high-level points:

  - Excellent performance of runtime code and garbage collector
  - Unifies many programming paradigms in a single language:
      object-oriented, functional, traditional imperative
  - Compilation times are fast and provide good diagnostic feedback
  - Code is very portable between Windows and Unix
  - Debugger supports replay functionality
  - More 3rd party libraries than similar languages (e.g. Haskell/Clean)
  - Powerful type-inference mechanism eliminating the need for most
    type annotations
  - Strict type-checker to catch many errors at compile time

Some specific points about the language:

  - First class functions - kind of like inner classes in Java but
    syntax is very lightweight and easy to use
  - Support for parametric polymorphism (extensional polymorphism
    is in the works)
  - Easy to define new data types and operate on them via pattern matching
    (a generalized case statement that allows arbitralily deep
    introspection)
  - Exceptions
  - Sophisticated module system including functors (a simple lamba
    calculus on modules to support paramterization)
  - OO framework with support for multiple inheritance, binary methods,
    and functional updates

I'm not particularly interested in entering a debate over which language
is better -- that's very much a personal choice.  Personally, I have a
strong mathematical background and appreciate formalism and notation.
For that reason, Haskell is in many ways a more attractive language to me.
However, OCaml still remains my language of choice for any serious
development work.

Patrick Doane