The main place to do the comparison is, ML Modules and Haskell Type Classes: A Constructive Comparison. Stefan Wehr and Manuel M.T. Chakravarty. In Proceedings of The Sixth ASIAN Symposium on Programming Languages and Systems – APLAS 2008, Springer-Verlag, LNCS, 2008. Modular Type Classes. Derek Dreyer, Robert Harper, and Manuel M. T. Chakravarty. In Proceedings … Read more
So I jumped the gun a bit. I forgot to add some items to my ~/.ocamlinit file. Specifically I forgot to add #use “topfind” #camlp4o #thread #require “core.top” #require “core.syntax” as mentioned in Chapter 1. D’oh!
Purely functional (aka persistent or immutable) data structures give you several advantages: you never have to lock them, which extremely improves concurrency. they can share structure, which reduces memory usage. For example, consider list [1, 2, 3, 4] in Haskell and some imperative language like Java. To produce new list in Haskell you only have … Read more
You’ve got a thorough listing of the options available, but this question will not have a clear answer. My personal recommendation is also to use ocamlbuild. The myocamlbuild.ml file provided here is a good start. It will allow you to easily compile projects that depend on various libraries. I don’t think it handles the case … Read more
Executive summary: I wrote a simple implementation of an algorithm… that wasn’t tail-recursive. I compiled it with OCaml under Linux. It worked fine, and finished in 0.14 seconds. It was then time to port to F#. I translated the code (direct translation) to F#. I compiled under Windows, and run it – I got a … Read more
you have experienced the difference between structural and physical equality. <> is to = (structural equality) as != is to == (physical equality) “odg” = “odg” (* true *) “odg” == “odg” (* false *) is false because each is instantiated in different memory locations, doing: let v = “odg” v == v (* true … Read more
Hal Daume has written several major machine learning algorithms during his Ph.D. (now he is an assistant professor and rising star in machine learning community) On his web page, there are a SVM, a simple decision tree and a logistic regression all in OCaml. By reading these code, you can have a feeling how machine … Read more
Having formerly been one of “those people”, I don’t know that there’s a succinct way to sum up why pattern-matching is such tasty goodness. It’s experiential. Back when I had just glanced at pattern-matching and thought it was a glorified switch statement, I think that I didn’t have experience programming with algebraic data types (tuples … Read more
Often times a compiler works a lot with trees. The source code is parsed into a syntax tree. That tree might then be transformed into another tree with type annotations to perform type checking. Now you might convert that tree into a tree only containing core language elements (converting syntactic sugar-like notations into an unsugared … Read more
There are lots of differences, some technical, some sociopolitical. I’ve tried to put more important differences first. SML is a language with a definition and a standard. It is stable (and in fact has been frozen so it cannot evolve). Objective Caml is an implementation controlled by a small group at INRIA. It continues to … Read more