From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from majordomo@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id IAA03511; Tue, 13 Apr 2004 08:15:23 +0200 (MET DST) X-Authentication-Warning: pauillac.inria.fr: majordomo set sender to owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr using -f Received: from concorde.inria.fr (concorde.inria.fr [192.93.2.39]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id IAA04868 for ; Tue, 13 Apr 2004 08:15:22 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from bureau14.utcc.utoronto.ca (bureau14.utcc.utoronto.ca [128.100.132.42]) by concorde.inria.fr (8.12.10/8.12.10) with ESMTP id i3D6FKYM027846 for ; Tue, 13 Apr 2004 08:15:21 +0200 Received: from user-292.gradstudents.utoronto.ca ([142.151.171.36] EHLO trevorkrny6zst ident: IDENT-NOT-QUERIED [port 4518]) by bureau14.utcc.utoronto.ca with ESMTP id <890037-19763>; Tue, 13 Apr 2004 02:15:13 -0400 From: "Trevor Andrade" To: "'John Goerzen'" , Subject: RE: [Caml-list] Dynamically evaluating OCaml code Date: Tue, 13 Apr 2004 02:15:06 -0400 Message-ID: <000001c4211e$aa699c40$24ab978e@trevorkrny6zst> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Priority: 3 (Normal) X-MSMail-Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook, Build 10.0.2616 In-Reply-To: <20040408155833.GG30763@excelhustler.com> X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2800.1165 Importance: Normal X-Miltered: at concorde by Joe's j-chkmail ("http://j-chkmail.ensmp.fr")! X-Loop: caml-list@inria.fr X-Spam: no; 0.00; andrade:01 andrade:01 caml-list:01 dynamically:01 ideally:01 smalltalk:01 python:01 perl's:01 cpan:01 raa:99 repositories:01 raa:99 monitored:99 repositories:01 cygwin's:01 Sender: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Precedence: bulk X-Status: X-Keywords: X-UID: 266 I think when discussing this we have to separate means and ends. The end that we would like is that we want to download a caml distribution from the internet and we get everything we want like IPV6, sockets, directory functions etc, and also probably a lot of stuff we will never use (internet connections are fast and disk space is cheap so who cares if its big). Ideally you should have one download where you get everything. Also this download should be fairly standardized so that most people can download the same library and it should be of high quality. Why is this necessary? Because history has shown it works. One of the main reasons many other languages like lisp and smalltalk are not very popular is that they don't have large standardized libraries. I also think that the reasons C++ is dying is that it does not have a good standardized library. Languages like Python are very popular precisely because they do have large standard libraries. Now the question is what are means through which you can accomplish giving people large standardized distributions with everything they need. One way is just to have a big standard library. Another way might be to separate the standard library into two parts a standard core library and a separate extended standard library. A third way is to just have a centralized repository like Perl's CPAN or Ruby's RAA. I think you have to be careful with large centralized repositories because the code quality can suck (eg Ruby's RAA) unless they are monitored well. Also if you do use a large central repository you often don't have standardized tools because different versions exist for things. Thirdly downloading and installing from centralized repositories should be easy so there should be a tool for doing this like cygwin's installation tool. I should mention that cygwin's installation tool is extremely nice. It handles dependencies, versioning and does remote installation. Miktex uses the cygwin tool to access the Tex archives. In this case the centralized repository method works pretty well. However in tex it does often happen that there are separate packages that you download that have some similar functions. I think Pyhon's big standard library model is the best. Using this method you get a nice big standardized distribution with everything you need. This makes your life very easy. In Python there are also many things outside the standard library and as the quality of these things gets better they often get put in the standard library. It should also be noted that its not really necessary for the core developers to manage everything in the standard library. In Python most of the standard library is not managed by the core developers of the language who work on things like the language and the interpreter. Instead the different parts are managed by either the author of that part or some maintainer. I don't see why core developers have to maintain the standard library. They should just decide what makes it in to the standard library. Regards, Trevor -----Original Message----- From: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr [mailto:owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr] On Behalf Of John Goerzen Sent: Thursday, April 08, 2004 11:59 AM To: Richard Jones; Ocaml Mailing List Subject: Re: [Caml-list] Dynamically evaluating OCaml code On Thu, Apr 08, 2004 at 05:26:54PM +0200, Markus Mottl wrote: > On Thu, 08 Apr 2004, Richard Jones wrote: > > which returns the first n members of a list. As for slicing the > > middle from a list, I tend to think that the original poster should > > probably be using a different, more suitable structure. Perhaps an > > Array if he wants random access. > > That's also my opinion: it's usually an indication of a bad choice > concerning datastructure if you need such list functions. One does not always have the choice of data structure. Sometimes, and this happens to be the case in several programs I've worked on recently, the inadequecies arise when I'm trying to get data frmo an older system into an OCaml-based one that does use more suitable structures. For instance, consider this problem, which is a simplified version of a real problem... I am reading a line-oriented file delimited by "|". It's easy enough to split this apart into a list (even though I must go to Str and regexps to do it, grr). Now, I know that I must ignore the first two and last three elements in that list. I do not know in advance what size the list will be, and it varies from line to line, but it always has at least five elements. I also do not necessarily know the values for "2" and "3" at compile time, though they are constant throughout execution of the program. The order of the elements is significant and must not be altered. Each element is the same type (ie, a String). There is nothing in the data itself that differentiates it. Now, which OCaml data structure gives me the ability to easily pull out such a slice? As far as I can tell, there are no standard functions for any of Array or List to do that. I could write a function for either of them to loop over it and get me what I want, but the point is that this functionality is useful. Now, there are arguably other ways to do this; I could use a complex regular expression to pull out the data in the center... ie: ([^|]*\|){2}(.*)(\|[^|]*){3} may do the trick in this particular example, but not always. (What if, instead of lines, I am dealing with packets coming in off the network?) One does not always get data handed to onesself on a platter, already nicely ordered and suitable for storing in a nice structure (in any language). Hell, half the time my first step is to -- yes -- convert to ASCII. (I sometimes have to work with data coming from an AS/400, an EBCDIC system that is thankfully being phased out) > I absolutely agree with you! But the point is: is this really so > important to have it in the _standard_ library? You didn't mention the > word "standard" so I suppose you'd be perfectly happy if somebody wrote a > fully-featured library for this kind of functionality? And you'd rather > like to see better "social tools" for making use of such contributions? I don't really care if it comes in ocaml.tar.gz or not, for some of these things. Some of them absolutely should, especially more powerful string/array/list slicing, IPv6, and POSIX interfaces. But many of the rest don't exist at all or require contortions to use. (For instance, there are two libraries out there named Extlib, both of which implement some of what I want with little overlap between them. How annoying.) I see these as critical ommissions from the actual standard library: * IPv6 and other socket-related and DNS-related problems * Lack of support for read/write handles in Pervasives (relegated to Unix and with complex interactions between the two) * String/array/list indexing/slicing improvements * Standard C/POSIX date/time functions * Path manipulation functions (about 75% of these are already there; I have no idea why the other 25% aren't) * mknod() and similar functions (we have mkfifo(), after all...) These are all enhancements of functionality already present in the standard library. Why would I be able to use the standard library for IPv4 but have to go elsewhere for IPv6? That doesn't really make sense. -- John ------------------- To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/ Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners ------------------- To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/ Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners