Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Comparing OCaml and Standard ML

adam.chlipala.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 71 posts

Re: Comparing OCaml and Standard ML

#11

Post by mercurial »

a0 wrote: post #8

ML's syntax is indeed less confusing than OCaml's. And that's the reason I'm working on a compiler front-end replacement for OCaml inspired by Clojure, Haskell, Ruby and Julia. It will be for OCaml what Elixir is for Erlang. I'm finishing the parser right now and will next implement the language primitives as a library in the language itself.

I'm curious about what you find particularly confusing about OCaml. I'm a (relative) newcomer to the language, but I find it extremely readable, even if it's a bit clunky at times.

Re: Comparing OCaml and Standard ML

#13

Post by mercurial »

CmonDev wrote: post #6

Wow, ML syntax is actually better than OCaml. It's a shame the former was used as a base for F#.

Really? I can see how it's nicer in some places, but you'll take currying and or patterns out of my cold, dead hands (and there are some cases where you do need objects).

Re: Comparing OCaml and Standard ML

#14

Post by p4bl0 »

yodsanklai wrote: post #7
p4bl0 wrote: post #3

Small update: recent versions of OCaml have immutable strings too. It also miss mention of package manager (OCaml has Opam, which is awesome, I don't know about SML). And ocamlbuild is missing from the build tools section.

Out of curiosity, why do you think Opam is awesome? I recently had to install a few OCaml projects and I had a hard time dealing with opam and ocamlfind (both on mac os and a linux VM). I suppose it's fine once everything is properly set up. I have the impression that the OCaml world has seen a lot of changes recently with a lot of complexity added.

I think Opam is very cool because it simplifies OCaml development a lot, just like any language package manager does for its language.

With Opam I can deploy my code on different machines very easily by installing the right version of OCaml and library dependencies in just a few command, and it just works.

The problem with ocamlfind you are mentioning was just a temporary bug I think, I also encountered it, but it will be fixed real soon, see: " rel="nofollow">https://github.com/ocaml/opam/issues/1671> for instance.

Re: Comparing OCaml and Standard ML

#15

Post by tomp »

a0 wrote: post #8

ML's syntax is indeed less confusing than OCaml's. And that's the reason I'm working on a compiler front-end replacement for OCaml inspired by Clojure, Haskell, Ruby and Julia. It will be for OCaml what Elixir is for Erlang. I'm finishing the parser right now and will next implement the language primitives as a library in the language itself.

Do you share the development anywhere online? Are you using Menhir? I could maybe help you if you're having any troubles with the parser, I've been working on many interesting and hard (LA)LR parser issues in the past few months. What will the syntax be like, any existing language, maybe like Julia?

Re: Comparing OCaml and Standard ML

#16

Post by tomp »

mercurial wrote: post #11
a0 wrote: post #8

ML's syntax is indeed less confusing than OCaml's. And that's the reason I'm working on a compiler front-end replacement for OCaml inspired by Clojure, Haskell, Ruby and Julia. It will be for OCaml what Elixir is for Erlang. I'm finishing the parser right now and will next implement the language primitives as a library in the language itself.

I'm curious about what you find particularly confusing about OCaml. I'm a (relative) newcomer to the language, but I find it extremely readable, even if it's a bit clunky at times.

What does this code do?

  if a > 0 then
    print_endline "a > 0" ;
    match a with
      | 0 -> print_endline "impossible"
      | 2 ->
        match b with
          | 0 -> print_endline "2, 0"
          | _ -> print_endline "2, not 0"
      | 3 -> print_endline "3, something"
      | _ -> print_endline "something, something"
  ;
  print_endline "done"

Re: Comparing OCaml and Standard ML

#17

Post by profquail »

CmonDev wrote: post #6

Wow, ML syntax is actually better than OCaml. It's a shame the former was used as a base for F#.

One thing I think F# got right is that it removed some of the "flexibility" in OCaml's syntax. For example, it uses significant whitespace to define scoping, which removed (in nearly all cases) the need for the 'in' keyword and lots of parentheses and semicolons. That may not sound like a huge deal, but it does greatly improve the readability of F# code (all other things being equal).

Re: Comparing OCaml and Standard ML

#18

Post by p4bl0 »

tomp wrote: post #16
mercurial wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious about what you find particularly confusing about OCaml. I'm a (relative) newcomer to the language, but I find it extremely readable, even if it's a bit clunky at times.

What does this code do? if a > 0 then print_endline "a > 0" ; match a with | 0 -> print_endline "impossible" | 2 -> match b with | 0 -> print_endline "2, 0" | _ -> print_endline "2, not 0" | 3 -> print_endline "3, something" | _ -> print_endline "something, something" ; print_endline "done"

Any decent programming editor will be able to indent that properly and you will see the problem. Also, I agree that it is a bit ugly but it's not that complicated to understand how the match syntax works. Adding a "begin" and an "end" in this code is simple enough :).

Re: Comparing OCaml and Standard ML

#19

Post by [deleted] »

tomp wrote: post #16
mercurial wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious about what you find particularly confusing about OCaml. I'm a (relative) newcomer to the language, but I find it extremely readable, even if it's a bit clunky at times.

What does this code do? if a > 0 then print_endline "a > 0" ; match a with | 0 -> print_endline "impossible" | 2 -> match b with | 0 -> print_endline "2, 0" | _ -> print_endline "2, not 0" | 3 -> print_endline "3, something" | _ -> print_endline "something, something" ; print_endline "done"

[deleted]

Re: Comparing OCaml and Standard ML

#20

Post by tomp »

p4bl0 wrote: post #18
tomp wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does this code do? if a > 0 then print_endline "a > 0" ; match a with | 0 -> print_endline "impossible" | 2 -> match b with | 0 -> print_endline "2, 0" | _ -> print_endline "2, not 0" | 3 -> print_endline "3, something" | _ -> print_endline "something, something" ; print_endline "done"

Any decent programming editor will be able to indent that properly and you will see the problem. Also, I agree that it is a bit ugly but it's not that complicated to understand how the match syntax works. Adding a "begin" and an "end" in this code is simple enough :).

It's not just the match syntax; it's also the `;` expression separator.

> Any decent programming editor will be able to indent that properly and you will see the problem.

This seems like a weak excuse. In particular, I could turn it around and say, "any decent programming language should be writable without an editor". Also, the issue isn't just reading, it's writing too - it's much harder to foresee/plan all the `begin`/`end`, while you're writing a line of code, that will make the lines that follow work as intended.

Post reply on HN