Re: [Caml-list] Proselytizing

[David Chase <chase@world.std.com>]

At 10:06 AM 4/18/2002 -0700, Charles Martin wrote:
>>Only a few weeks ago I managed to convert some staunch CL-programming
>>colleague to OCaml (after one year of merciless proselytizing!).
>...
>By the way, I scanned the new translated OCaml book and I have to say, it is a very impressive piece of work.  The publication of this and Benjamin Pierce's new book might help OCaml past the inflection point.

Slightly better packaging/checking on the demos would be a good thing.

I am trying, as hard as possible in my non-copious free time,
to get past my own inflection point, and one sticking point is
confusion with CamlTk.  I thought it worked -- it's clearly
"here" enough to run the browser, and I did the load and execute
game in the scripting window, but when I try the examples, it
fails to find it:

-- Making all in camltk
(This program requires the CamlTk library;
 if you haven't installed it, compilation will fail.)
make[1]: Entering directory `/h/image/ftp.inria.fr/oc/camltk'
ocamlc -I +camltk -c start.ml
File "start.ml", line 25, characters 0-7:
Unbound module Tk
make[1]: *** [start.cmo] Error 2
make[1]: Leaving directory `/h/image/ftp.inria.fr/oc/camltk'
make: [all] Error 2 (ignored)

I'm sure this is some sort of pilot error on my part, but it's 
not getting me to where I want to be.  I tried to modify the makefile
to use labltk instead of camltk, but it failed there with

File "start.ml", line 31, characters 6-27:
Expecting function has type
  ?name:string ->
  ?activebackground:Tk.color ->
  ?activeforeground:Tk.color ->
  ?anchor:Tk.anchor ->
  ?background:Tk.color ->
  ?bitmap:Tk.bitmap ->
  ?borderwidth:int ->
  ?command:(unit -> unit) ->
  ?cursor:Tk.cursor ->
  ?disabledforeground:Tk.color ->
  ?font:string ->
  ?foreground:Tk.color ->
  ?height:int ->
  ?highlightbackground:Tk.color ->
  ?highlightcolor:Tk.color ->
  ?highlightthickness:int ->
  ?image:[< Tk.image] ->
  ?justify:Tk.justification ->
  ?padx:int ->
  ?pady:int ->
  ?relief:Tk.relief ->
  ?state:Tk.state ->
  ?takefocus:bool ->
  ?text:string ->
  ?textvariable:Textvariable.textVariable ->
  ?underline:int ->
  ?width:int -> ?wraplength:int -> Widget.button Widget.widget

I also tried to install camltk separately, but that was an
almighty mess (among other things, the configuration uses
obsolete macros to check for the existence of Cygwin, never
mind total confusion about what tools to use to make libraries,
and what suffixes different sorts of file should have.)

I am doing all this on Windows 2k, with some recent version
of Cygwin, and Scriptics Tcl/tk installed, and ocaml 3.04.
Remember -- I am getting stumped by one of the demos that
is supposed to get people started, and I am normally capable
of installing garbage like Oracle, Apache, mail server
software, and firewalls, all with my bare hands.  Something
that is supposed to be easy and confidence building, isn't.

David Chase


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