Experimental extension of OCaml with XML types

Experimental extension of OCaml with XML types

[Alain Frisch]

Dear caml-list,

I'd like to announce an experimental extension of OCaml with built-in 
support for XML types. It can be seen roughly as a merger between OCaml 
and CDuce (http://www.cduce.org/). The compiler has been implemented on 
top of OCaml 3.08.2 and CDuce 0.3.2.

The OCaml+CDuce language is intended to provide a simple way to deal 
with XML documents in OCaml applications. Thanks to XML types, you get 
static guarantees about the type of XML documents produced by the 
application. XML pattern matching is a powerful operation, reminiscent 
of ML pattern matching but much more powerful. Some facilities are 
provided to translate automatically from regular ML values to CDuce 
values and back.

The language might also be useful for non-XML applications: debugging
(using ML-to-XML translation), string regular expression
(types and patterns), ...

Documentation is very succinct for the moment:
http://pauillac.inria.fr/~frisch/ocamlcduce/doc/README.cduce
http://pauillac.inria.fr/~frisch/ocamlcduce/doc/
http://pauillac.inria.fr/~frisch/ocamlcduce/tests/

The CDuce documentation might be useful as well:
http://www.cduce.org/documentation


Home page: http://www.cduce.org/ocaml.html

GODI users can try this extension by adding this line:
   GODI_BUILD_SITES += http://pauillac.inria.fr/~frisch/ocamlcduce/godi
to their etc/godi.conf file, and by forcing a recompilation of the 
godi-ocaml-src and godi-ocaml packages. They should also build
the godi-xml-support library, which features bindings for XML parsers 
(pxp,expat,xml-light) and a tool dtd2types (to generates type 
declarations from a DTD).


Enjoy !


   Alain