Geoff recommended the following books for getting started with OCaml via this comment:
Introduction to Objective Caml by Jason Hickey
Developing Applications With Objective Caml by Emmanuel Chailloux, Pascal Manoury and Bruno Pagano
OCaml for Scientists by Dr. Jon D. Harrop
I would like to try out OCaml. From what I have read, though, it is only happy running on UNIX. Without a UNIX box at the moment I decided to try out Sun’s VirtualBox with Ubuntu.
Setup, configuration, and installation took less than an hour. Directories can easily be shared between the host and the guest (Windows XP and Ubuntu in this case), which is convenient for me because I share my Bazaar checkout folder. The NAT network adapter is configured “out of the box”. Everything “just worked”; it was a really pleasant experience.
These days there really aren’t many obstacles to running, or even just trying out, Linux.
This re-make of the classic arcade game “space invaders” is based on the version available on the well known arcade emulator called mame. It is made to look as close as possible to the original arcade game.
This game was made for fun, but also in the context of my master’s thesis at the university of Montreal under the supervision of Marc Feeley. The aim behind writing video games in scheme is to try to demonstrate not only that it is possible to write games in scheme, but that such games would have smaller developpement time, better code, less bugs, etc…
Thus space invaders is only the first step into my thesis and more games will be comming up later! I would like also to note that the version 1.0 is only a draft. Much ugly things can be found in the code and I will still continue the developpement of this game further by ameliorating the way the code is structured and modify parts of it’s basic architecture to experiment different design ideas. This is what’s beautifull about scheme, isn’t it? I tried to comment the code so that it should be understandable by interested schemers.
I hope you can enjoy this game as well as I enjoyed developping it!
David St-Hilaire
sthilaid@iro.umontreal.ca
(via stevebook)
This seems to be the best guide to Caml online forums. In particular, caml-list, caml-announce, ocaml-jobs, and “OCaml Beginners” look good.
to turn ideas into software, quickly and faithfully
— John Chambers
Great aim!
Here is a great article (and piece of code) that addresses one of the few complaints about tail-recursion, the inability to easily collect debugging information. It is just wonderful.
Via plt-dev:
I’m pleased to announce the initial release of parallel futures, a construct for fine-grained parallelism in PLT. Roughly speaking, a programmer passes a thunk to ‘future’ and it gets run in parallel. That “roughly” holds a few gotchas, partly because we’re just getting started and partly due to the technique we’re using. See the documentation for more details:
http://pre.plt-scheme.org/docs/html/futures/
Here is a good thread on conditional inclusion of code in PLT Scheme. Basically the OP wanted to use platform-specific module code (think development versus on the cluster). The recommended solution was to use dynamic-require.
Happy Halloween with PLT! 🙂
