On Thu, 21 Jul 2005, Phil Tomson wrote: > In article <Pine.LNX.4.62.0507192121430.10750 / harp.ngdc.noaa.gov>, > Ara.T.Howard <Ara.T.Howard / noaa.gov> wrote: >> On Wed, 20 Jul 2005, Hal Fulton wrote: >> >>> Ara.T.Howard wrote: >>>> On Wed, 20 Jul 2005, Hal Fulton wrote: >>>>> >>>>> But I am happy with Ruby until something better comes along. >>>>> Such as Ruby 2.0. >>>> >>>> what do you think of ocaml hal? >>>> >>> >>> Is that an Irish animal that can go for a week >>> without a drink? >> >> yes. ;-) >> >>> >>> Seriously, I've never looked at that one. Nor >>> Haskell either. >>> >>> I know I should look at things like that, but my >>> to-do list is already formidable. >> >> i bought a very expensive book on it from >> >> http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/ocaml_for_scientists/ >> >> it was quite good but bloody expensive. ping me and i'll loan it to you. >> > > > So, Ara, what do you think of OCaml after reading that book? > (investigating OCaml has been on my TODO list for a few years now, but > it'll have to wait till my thesis is done). it seems extremely powerful for doing algorithmic work and the compilation produces binaries that can be as fast, or faster, than c whilst you get things like adts, gc, first class functions, etc. all built-in. frankly it makes you wonder why someone would use c++ or java. btw. microsoft has stolen ocaml and branded it F# so they must think there's something there too. i've been looking for a project to do with it but haven't had time to breath - i'll know more then. i can say that even writing 'hello world' requires a paradigm shift if you haven't (like me) done any functional coding before - it's quite a switch. about the only thing i didn't like is how is sort of does everything : functional, imperitive, oo, etc. in a way that vaguely reminded me of perl. in summary, the code i've read is extremely concise considering the speed - but not as consice as ruby for most things. that being said it seems like a good candidate to do certain things in using something develop fast, maintain fast, runs : ruby develop fast, maintain fast, runs med : ruby + c ext develop med, maintain med, runs fast : ocaml develop slow, maintain slow, runs fast : c or something like that. thing is, being in research, i can't justify dropping below one or two for many things and haven't done so since reading the book. cheers. -a -- =============================================================================== | email :: ara [dot] t [dot] howard [at] noaa [dot] gov | phone :: 303.497.6469 | My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness. | --Tenzin Gyatso ===============================================================================