Re: [Caml-list] Teaching bottomline, part 3: what should improve.

[Jon Harrop <jon@ffconsultancy.com>]

On Wednesday 23 May 2007 21:20:57 David Teller wrote:
> On Wed, 2007-05-23 at 00:39 +0100, Jon Harrop wrote:
> > Fascinating. Thanks for reporting the information. If I might be so brash
> > as to comment on the problems you had that have already been fixed by F#:
>
> I mentioned F# to them, by the way. Somewhere along the lines of "It looks
> good, it might be the future, unfortunately, at the moment, you need
> Windows and 400€ worth of Visual Studio to try it".

This blog entry implies that F# works with free editions of Visual Studio:

  http://grammerjack.spaces.live.com/blog/cns!F2629C772A178A7C!156.entry

I'll try F# on a machine without the commercial Visual Studio ASAP and see if 
I can get it working.

> So far, I have no budget, and Windows.

Could they boot the machines into Linux at the start of each lecture?

> Can I get this graphical throwback without VS ?

I do not believe so although there are some free IDEs:

  http://sourceforge.net/projects/sharpedit/

> Div and mod ? How so ?

Div and mod by constants are not optimized by the OCaml compiler, which can 
lead to pathological performance on some programs (e.g. sieve, sudoku).

> Plus I tend to believe that the OCaml-style future looks more like
> JoCaml (or Acute, or Oz, or Erlang) than like semaphores.

Except for Erlang, none of those languages have a significant number of users 
today. I haven't tried Erlang but it may be worth a look.

-- 
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
The F#.NET Journal
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/fsharp_journal/?e