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

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

To provide a more objective viewpoint on OCaml, here are some thoughts I
have on how I think it can be improved:

  - more bindings to native os libraries
  - lack of an IDE
      (two recent developments are working on this, one native OCaml
       development and another that leverages VC++)
  - OCaml byte-code can't run OCaml native-code easily
      (the reverse is possible with a slight performance hit)
  - no debugger support for native-code
  - needs better package management support
  - improved standard library with more consistent APIs
      (the Caml team is really good about backwards compatibility which
       makes progress in this area unlikely)
  - more documentation/tutorials
  - some form of operator overloading to at least deal with
    floating point and integer operations
      (Jun Furuse is working on an extensional polymorphism extension
       that would solve this and much more)
  - some syntax rules from a historical perspective can be confusing
      (camlp4 solves this nicely, and version 3.04 allows syntax
       extensions to be used in the top-level interpreter.
       Users can use a wide variety of syntax options and extend
       the language with new keywords and constructs)

On Mon, 24 Dec 2001, Kent Quirk wrote:

> It looks a bit light on the library side, but it may prove to be a very
> useful tools language and perhaps even a delivery language.

Please let the community know what libraries and tools you need to make it
a success.

> I've just downloaded a version and will start tinkering on my vacation.
> I'll let you know in a week or so. ;-)

Sounds good - I'll be interested to hear your opinions.

Patrick