The French and British descendants of the original ML made different choices and their choices have been inherited through the decades to the modern variants. So this is just legacy but it does affect idioms in these languages. Functions are not recursive by default in the French CAML family of languages (including OCaml). This choice … Read more
This is called a tagged pointer representation, and is a pretty common optimization trick used in many different interpreters, VMs and runtime systems for decades. Pretty much every Lisp implementation uses them, many Smalltalk VMs, many Ruby interpreters, and so on. Usually, in those languages, you always pass around pointers to objects. An object itself … Read more
This question has been answered for some time now, but I was quite surprised that most of the answers say what OCaml features are missing in F# – this is definitely good to know if you want to port existing OCaml programs to F# (which is probably the motivation of most of the referenced articles). … Read more
The value restriction is a limitation of the OCaml type system that prevents some polymorphic values from being generalized, i.e. having a type that is universally quantified over all type variables. This is done to preserve soundness of the type system in the presence of mutable references and side effects. In your case, the value … Read more
The word “functor” comes from category theory, which is a very general, very abstract branch of mathematics. It has been borrowed by designers of functional languages in at least two different ways. In the ML family of languages, a functor is a module that takes one or more other modules as a parameter. It’s considered … Read more