Re: [Caml-list] Teaching OCaml

[Michael Hamburg <hamburg@fas.harvard.edu>]

Hi.

A few thoughts on the subject.

Iif you want practical features of OCaml, you could try the classic  
"QuickSort in n lines" where n depends on how efficient you want to  
make it, but you can still achieve O(n log n) in something like 4  
lines.  It takes 10 or so to be efficient, compared to at least 50 in  
C.  Of course, Haskell has even nicer syntax for this, but it looks  
good in O'Caml too.

As for conceptual features, O'Caml is, as far as I know, the only  
functional language with OO, even if it is somewhat limited OO (due to  
type-system constraints).  For industrial projects, this enables  
programmers to work together more easily (or is intended to, anyway),  
while writing much less code than for most imperative languages.  For  
academics, it has been said that programmers, especially  
mathematicians, find functional programming very intuitive.

Just some suggestions,
Mike Hamburg

On May 17, 2004, at 7:28 AM, Simão Melo de Sousa wrote:

>
> It looks like my previous post never reached the caml-list.
> So, accept my apologies if you receive my post twice.
>
> ------
>
> Hi!
>
> There is, in the Computer Science department of my university, a
> interesting discussion about the programming languages that we should
> teach.  Because I defend that functional programming (Haskell,
> etc... but Ocaml in particular) has to be teach among other
> "classical" paradigms, I have to prepare a talk about the relevance of
> the functional programming paradigm in general and OCaml in
> particular.
>
> I know that this kind of topic have been already discussed and that
> there is a lot of available "material". Nevertheless, I'm interested in
>   any suggestions, links to papers, slides, sites...
>
> I'm particularly interested in two kind of informations:
>
> 1) material (list of facts, etc..) that describes the good features of  
> OCaml (in conceptual terms but also in pratical terms) from the point  
> of view of both the Academy and the Industry.
> 2) url of Caml based functional programming courses sites
>
> Thanks a lot!
> Simao Melo de Sousa
> ps: Use my email for answers, I will reply to the list with a digest  
> of them.
>
>
> --  
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 
> -
> Simão Melo de Sousa            | Professor Auxiliar
> * -> ., # -> @ => email Simão -> desousa#di*ubi*pt
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> Universidade da Beira Interior | Tel: +351 275 319 891
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