Objective Caml 1.00

[Xavier Leroy <xleroy@pauillac.inria.fr>]

We are proud to announce the availability of Objective Caml version 1.00.

Objective Caml is an object-oriented extension of the Caml dialect of ML.
It is statically type-checked (no "message not understood" run-time errors)
and performs ML-style type reconstruction (no type declarations for function
parameters). This is arguably the first publically available
object-oriented language featuring ML-style type reconstruction.

Objective Caml is a class-based OO language, and offers pretty much
all standard features of these languages, including "self", single and
multiple inheritance, "super", and binary methods, plus a number of
less common features such as parametric classes.

The main limitation (due to type reconstruction) is that coercion from
an object type to a supertype is not automatic, and needs to be
written down explicitly. Message sending remains fully polymorphic,
though.

Objective Caml is based on (and supersedes) the Caml Special Light
system. It inherits from Caml Special Light a powerful module
calculus, Modula-style separate compilation, a fast-turnaround
bytecode compiler, and a high-performance native-code compiler.
Upward compatilibity with Caml Special Light is very high.

More information on Objective Caml, including tutorials and user's
manuals, is available on the Web, at

        http://pauillac.inria.fr/ocaml/

Objective Caml is available for Unix (source) and Windows NT/95 (binaries).
The distribution resides at the usual place,

        ftp://ftp.inria.fr/lang/caml-light

Bug reports should be mailed to caml-light@pauillac.inria.fr.
More general discussions on Objective Caml take place on the Caml
mailing list (caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr, subscriptions at
caml-list-request@pauillac.inria.fr) or the comp.lang.ml newsgroup.

- Xavier Leroy
  Didier Rémy
  Jérôme Vouillon

INRIA Rocquencourt, projet Cristal, B.P.105, 78153 Le Chesnay, France.
caml-light@pauillac.inria.fr