I'd quite the same question one week ago.

As we see in the home page of ocaml at INRIA, "/Caml supports 
functional, imperative, and object-oriented programming styles/".
I think that you are interested by the functional one.
So, even if Ocaml allows you to make algorithm with the imperative 
features, it is interesting to make programs without them almost for two 
reasons :
  - this is an other way to think your program
  - for a better quality of your program (less global var => less 
side-effects) according to my little experience

As for designing method, it seems that flow charts are generally 
convenient but not for all (ex: concept of interface with signature of a 
module).
As for me, I almost need a design language to describe a project that is 
already developed and data-flow could be extracted from the code (this 
is doc-generation).
At a higher level, if you want to describe organization of you project 
into modules and libraries, you can use component diagram in UML to have 
a standard representation.

I regret that modeling tools are not used for ocaml development, I think 
it could be better to share same methods and representation in that domain.


Stéphane Duprat


Julien Peeters a écrit :
> Ok,
>
> Thanks all ones for answers...
>
> I imagine that designing applications with functional languages is much
> different than with imperative ones.
> I was wondering on which points the difference is significant?
> Does common oriented object design patterns can be used with OCaml?
> And what, for a developer, is the work to do to change his way of
> thinking?
>
> I envisage to learn OCaml deeply and than I want to set the basis to do
> the change from imperative languages to functional ones.
>
> P.S. : somebody have reference books which goes over this subject?
>