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 NAA05050; Thu, 20 Jun 2002 13:23:35 +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 NAA05152 for ; Thu, 20 Jun 2002 13:23:35 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from pauillac.inria.fr (pauillac.inria.fr [128.93.11.35]) by concorde.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.11.1) with ESMTP id g5KBNY917476; Thu, 20 Jun 2002 13:23:34 +0200 (MET DST) Received: (from xleroy@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id NAA04907; Thu, 20 Jun 2002 13:23:33 +0200 (MET DST) Date: Thu, 20 Jun 2002 13:23:33 +0200 From: Xavier Leroy To: Alessandro Baretta Cc: Ocaml Subject: Re: [Caml-list] Unix.file_descr -> int ??? Message-ID: <20020620132333.B2180@pauillac.inria.fr> References: <3D0F37E6.6000307@baretta.com> <000101c21705$d9f23640$0501a8c0@lexifi01> <3D0FB722.6000009@baretta.com> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii X-Mailer: Mutt 1.0i In-Reply-To: <3D0FB722.6000009@baretta.com>; from alex@baretta.com on Wed, Jun 19, 2002 at 12:41:38AM +0200 Sender: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Precedence: bulk > Oh, it was definitely meant to be public. It was astonishing > for me to hear an ex-IBM researcher, a man on science, one > would imagine, say that his customers are not interested in > any new or advanced stuff. And I'm pretty sure he knows what > he's talking about. What's so surprising about this? This man chose a particular line of business where customers are not interested in new or advanced stuff. Just like you could choose to manage a McDonald's and have no professional interest in gourmet food or fine wines. I'm not disturbed in the least by the fact that many computer professionals couldn't care less about what we do. (And conversely :-) What I am concerned about is the well-meaning suggestions that we should move towards "their" technologies in the vague hope that they will pay more attention then. They won't. > They want *real_world* products on > *real_world* platforms: COBOL and .NET, that's what they want." > No comment. But if Ocaml could somehow "run on .NET", people > like the above CEO (an ex-mathematician and IBM researcher, > by the way) would be a whole lot more interested in Ocaml. Again, I think this is a fallacy. By the same logic: "if OCaml could somehow 'look like COBOL', people like the above CEO would be a lot more interested in OCaml". "if Bordeaux red wines were carbonated, McDonald's would be a lot more interested in selling them". You can make your own parallels: it's fun :-) > Xavier, let me ask a dumb question, if you don't mind: how > do you choose which processor architectures to port ocamlopt > to? By a combination of demand and availability (of a machine running said architecture). > Could .NET simply be regarded as a new "architecture" for ocamlopt? Not at all. .NET isn't just a (virtual) machine instruction set: it's a whole infrastructure, including memory management, data representation formats, systems services, libraries, etc. All these replace (and conflict with) those we have in the OCaml implementation. Our past experiments in retargeting the OCaml implementation to .Net failed because of this. For more details, and an explanation of why .Net is a real straight-jacket for innovative programming languages, see a previous post of mine: http://caml.inria.fr/archives/200102/msg00190.html - Xavier Leroy ------------------- 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