Re: [Ocaml-lib-devel] Future of ExtLib

[Yamagata Y. <yor...@mb...>]

Before anything, I'd like to mention the recent exchange about another
"extlib" in the caml-list and others.  I'm little embarrassed in the
current situation.  If I remember correctly, another "extlib" is older
than ours, so, in my opinion, we have to change the name.  Whatever
reasons there are, we have to give a due credit to the previous work.
If we are going to change the nature of our library, then it is a good
opportunity to change the name.

From: "Nicolas Cannasse" <war...@fr...>
Subject: [Ocaml-lib-devel] Future of ExtLib
Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2004 09:29:01 +0100

> That's convenient, but in fact since we're keeping 99% compability
> with stdlib, having the user to port the small parts of his code and
> then he can use all extensions provided as if he was using stdlib
> seems to be a fair trade.  Of course this means some changes to
> current project, and that's why I would like to get your comments
> and advices about this - I'm especialy interested in current
> ExtLib's contributors opinions.

I'm not clear about what you want to do.  But if you mean, say, we
provide List module in extlib, so that override List of the stdlib,
then I think it is definitely a bad idea. In addition to forcing to
use the new stdlib in order to access some module in extlib, it will
cause incomprehensive "inconsistent assumption" error if modules using
old stdlib and using new stdlib are mixed up.  If we use -pack option,
then the change would be more bearable, but I prefer to split extlib
to several packages, one for replacing stdlib, another for providing
new features.  Maybe we could split the packages for their purpose,
like providing new data structure, I/O, etc, too.

From: "Nicolas Cannasse" <war...@fr...>
Subject: [Ocaml-lib-devel] Future of ExtLib
Date: Fri, 19 Mar 2004 09:29:01 +0100

> Concerning additionnals modules here's what's on my wish-list (which is
> somehow also on my current todo-list) :
> - base64 encode/decode
> - abstract high level I/O with support for C basic types ( read_i16 ,
> write_f16 ..... )
> - zlib deflate/inflate written in pure OCaml.

Do you interested in diet set and map? (set and map over integer,
internally represented as sets and maps over intervals.)  I could
contribute them.  Also, I'd like to change install.ml so that it
ignores findlib if the destination directory is explicitly given by
the arguments. 

--
Yamagata Yoriyuki