In this post I read that:
OCaml’s standard library is one of its weakest parts. Always use extensions to the std library.
Searching around the net I find ExtLib, Batteries, and Janestreet.
I’m not sure what “weakest link” meant in the original post so I will leave it wide open for any concerns that people have. Perhaps it means that it does not have enough functionality? Or slow? Or there is something odd about the APIs?
It is true that OCaml’s standard library is its weakest link?
Here is one fellow’s feedback on OCaml.
It is balanced and seems useful, especially given that he links to his philosophy on languages, which appears to be a healthy one.
I had wondered:
What is the defacto OCaml build tool?
to which Sylvain replied:
– ocamlbuild (in OCaml distribution)
– OCamlMakefile
Some other use OMake.
After building OCaml 3.11.2 from source on Cygwin 1.72 I tried running ocamlbrowser and got the error:
Fatal error: exception Protocol.TkError("Can't find a usable init.tcl in the following directories:
C:/cygwin/share/tcl8.4
C:/cygwin/home/rettkeg/ocaml/build/ocaml-3.11.2/share/tcl8.4
C:/cygwin/home/rettkeg/ocaml/build/ocaml-3.11.2/usr/share/tcl8.4
C:/cygwin/home/rettkeg/o
The solution is can be found here:
export TCL_LIBRARY=/usr/share/tcl8.4
I had wondered:
Is it “poor taste” to include type information in function definitions?
It seems like very nice documentation, but then again, maybe it is nicer rely on the inferencing engine to reduce the amount of code?
In theory you write short, easy to understand functions; in practice it isn’t always this simple though.
People kindly replied:
When you can avoid it, it is better to NOT include type information. Using a tool like “ocamldoc” will render the function and its inferred types in a real documentation format (e.g. HTML).
There are cases where you need to include type information, but they are corner cases.
— Sylvain
Interface files (.mli) are usually the main place for documentation. Within the .ml files, you can explain your algorithms but it’s usually just plain comments, not so much type annotations.
— Martin
As to the matter of “taste”, note that this practice is not idiomatic in Ocaml, in contrast to Haskell where it seems current. I’m not sure if that’s your case, but people coming to Ocaml from Haskell may at first tend to exaggerate on this aspect…
— Dario
I didn’t find one in Pervasives, and having read this thread I see why and that there probably is not one.
However, I wanted to do something like initialize an array of (0..9) and figured that identity is more convenient than (fun i -> i).
Raphael explained that it can be found here in Batteries Included.
(via ocaml-beginners)
The ‘“The Whitespace Thing” for OCaml‘ is
is an alternative syntax for OCaml that uses indentation to group multi-line expressions
Although I am not to the point where I could like or dislike something like this yet, I wonder how long time OCaml users feel about it?
Via the homepage:
OUnit is a unit test framework for OCaml. It allows one to easily create unit-tests for OCaml code. It is based on HUnit, a unit testing framework for Haskell. It is similar to JUnit, and other XUnit testing frameworks.
The Batteries Included project has come under new management since David Teller moved on. The project has gone through a process of reorganization and is finally ready for a release. We’ve rethought a lot of the structure decisions of the old codebase to make it easier to use and develop.
(via Caml-list)