Re: OCAML, was CMinusMins, was Re: [Qemu-devel] get_func() hangs with gcc 3.4.2 on MinGW and WinXP host

[Mark A. Williamson]

Apologies for going slightly OT.  I don't want to start a fight, so I'll just 
give a brief explanation.

> What is Objective CAML?

OCAML is a dialect of ML (Meta Language), the other main dialect being 
Standard ML (SML).  The ML family is a functional language with eager 
evaluation semantics (function arguments are evaluated before calling a 
function).

There is a strong emphasis on immutable data structures although all ML 
dialects that I know of include traditional features (pointers, 
assignment...) as well.  ML languages use a very powerful type-checker with a 
"type inference" algorithm (it figures out what types things should have) and 
powerful support for functions that return other functions or take others as 
arguments (nicer than function pointers).

OCAML adds Object orientation features to the ML dialect CAML.

There are various pros and cons to functional languages and I don't want to 
start a fight over the relative merits of different paradigms.  There's lots 
more information on the web, Google, Foldoc and Wikipedia will probably all 
provide useful information.

HTH,
Mark