[Caml-list] Arithmetic operations

[Caml-list] Arithmetic operations

[Christophe Papazian]

Hi

It would be so good if some missing operations on numbers could be  
added to the standard set :

For regular integer : sqrt, pow, log2, factorial
For Big_int : log2, lsl, lsr, lor, land, lxor, lnot, factorial
For reals : erf, erfc, gamma, lgamma, and constante pi


For info : log2 n returns the position of the highest weight bit in n  
(integer logarithmic)
(log2 0 -> 0, log2 1 -> 1, log2 2 to 3 -> 2, log2 4 to 7 -> 3, log2 8  
to 15 -> 4, log2 16 to 31 -> 5, etc...)

The lack of those functions gives a feeling of immaturity of the  
language.
Is it possible in some near futur release to add them ?

	Christophe

[Caml-list] Re: Arithmetic operations

[Dawid Toton]

> It would be so good if some missing operations on numbers could be
> added to the standard set : (...)
> The lack of those functions gives a feeling of immaturity of the
> language.
> Is it possible in some near futur release to add them ?
This is a matter of libraries, not the language. The standard library
coming with raw ocaml distribution is intended to be lightweight and
minimal. It is a library like core[1] or batteries[2] that should
provide the "standard set" of operations. You can consider filling a
feature request ticket.

Dawid

[1] http://ocaml.janestreet.com/?q=node/13
[2] http://batteries.forge.ocamlcore.org/

Re: [Caml-list] Re: Arithmetic operations

[Christophe Papazian]

Selling cars without tires !

This is a huge problem of the ocaml community. Who wants a minimal  
library ?
What makes other languages popular ? There are huge API.
For Ocaml, the main web site is just for the compiler, the ocaml hump  
is refreshed
each month with few new things. So I need to use as well godi (another  
web site),
batteries (still in progress, another web site), janestreet (another  
solution, another
web site). Everybody is making is own api, which is not very  
interesting for the end user.

When I use python or latex, eveything is centralized, I pick the  
packages I need, and all is done.
Ocaml situation would be understandable if this was something new, but  
after 15 years, it's just
the french way : "We have good ideas, but we don't care how to sell  
them".
And this must be a reason why ocaml community is still small.

	Christophe





Le 30 mars 11 à 14:57, Dawid Toton a écrit :

>
>> It would be so good if some missing operations on numbers could be
>> added to the standard set : (...)
>> The lack of those functions gives a feeling of immaturity of the
>> language.
>> Is it possible in some near futur release to add them ?
> This is a matter of libraries, not the language. The standard library
> coming with raw ocaml distribution is intended to be lightweight and
> minimal. It is a library like core[1] or batteries[2] that should
> provide the "standard set" of operations. You can consider filling a
> feature request ticket.
>
> Dawid
>
> [1] http://ocaml.janestreet.com/?q=node/13
> [2] http://batteries.forge.ocamlcore.org/
>
> -- 
> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
> https://sympa-roc.inria.fr/wws/info/caml-list
> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
>

Re: [Caml-list] Re: Arithmetic operations

[Pierre-Alexandre Voye]

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It's funny, because I'm studying why language succeed or not, for my M1
dissertation (M1 Management), and it's one of the big factor, among others,
of sucess.
Ocaml is highly expressive, so you could turn around, but it's a big
problem.

I think it would be important and interesting to create a little
organization which discuss bout a standard lib and would begin making a
synthesis of all these "standard" library.

It would be very interesting too, to  a lot of company which could take
advantage of the "0 debug" advantages of caml : This fact imply a lot of cut
in software building costs which would be a great advantage for company who
would offer service based on OCaml.

OCaml is now mature, it could be considered out of the laboratory, it thus
become able to cross the chasm :
http://robrozicki.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/crossing_the_chasm1.png

But making a good compiler with a minimal API isn't sufficient.

So, in summary :
- OCaml is ready to cross the chasm, it was too early 10 years ago
- Ocaml need a huge __standard__ API. And there a lot of work to unify about
this
- Ocaml need a standard lib package management, and some good ones exist for
Ocaml



2011/3/31 Christophe Papazian <christophe.papazian@gmail.com>

> Selling cars without tires !
>
> This is a huge problem of the ocaml community. Who wants a minimal library
> ?
> What makes other languages popular ? There are huge API.
> For Ocaml, the main web site is just for the compiler, the ocaml hump is
> refreshed
> each month with few new things. So I need to use as well godi (another web
> site),
> batteries (still in progress, another web site), janestreet (another
> solution, another
> web site). Everybody is making is own api, which is not very interesting
> for the end user.
>
> When I use python or latex, eveything is centralized, I pick the packages I
> need, and all is done.
> Ocaml situation would be understandable if this was something new, but
> after 15 years, it's just
> the french way : "We have good ideas, but we don't care how to sell them".
> And this must be a reason why ocaml community is still small.
>
>        Christophe
>
>
>
>
>
> Le 30 mars 11 à 14:57, Dawid Toton a écrit :
>
>
>
>>  It would be so good if some missing operations on numbers could be
>>> added to the standard set : (...)
>>> The lack of those functions gives a feeling of immaturity of the
>>> language.
>>> Is it possible in some near futur release to add them ?
>>>
>> This is a matter of libraries, not the language. The standard library
>> coming with raw ocaml distribution is intended to be lightweight and
>> minimal. It is a library like core[1] or batteries[2] that should
>> provide the "standard set" of operations. You can consider filling a
>> feature request ticket.
>>
>> Dawid
>>
>> [1] http://ocaml.janestreet.com/?q=node/13
>> [2] http://batteries.forge.ocamlcore.org/
>>
>> --
>> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
>> https://sympa-roc.inria.fr/wws/info/caml-list
>> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
>> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
>>
>>
>
>
> --
> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
> https://sympa-roc.inria.fr/wws/info/caml-list
> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
>
>


-- 
---------------------
Isaac Project - http://www.lisaac.org/

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Re: [Caml-list] Re: Arithmetic operations

[Gabriel Scherer]

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This topic has been discussed to death already. If you want a more
comprehensive library, help make it happen. The batteries project would
certainly be happy to accept your patches for functions such as erf, erfc,
gamma etc. It already has some of the features you requests (eg. a pi
constant).

On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 9:56 AM, Christophe Papazian <
christophe.papazian@gmail.com> wrote:

> Selling cars without tires !
>
> This is a huge problem of the ocaml community. Who wants a minimal library
> ?
> What makes other languages popular ? There are huge API.
> For Ocaml, the main web site is just for the compiler, the ocaml hump is
> refreshed
> each month with few new things. So I need to use as well godi (another web
> site),
> batteries (still in progress, another web site), janestreet (another
> solution, another
> web site). Everybody is making is own api, which is not very interesting
> for the end user.
>
> When I use python or latex, eveything is centralized, I pick the packages I
> need, and all is done.
> Ocaml situation would be understandable if this was something new, but
> after 15 years, it's just
> the french way : "We have good ideas, but we don't care how to sell them".
> And this must be a reason why ocaml community is still small.
>
>        Christophe
>
>
>
>
>
> Le 30 mars 11 à 14:57, Dawid Toton a écrit :
>
>
>
>>  It would be so good if some missing operations on numbers could be
>>> added to the standard set : (...)
>>> The lack of those functions gives a feeling of immaturity of the
>>> language.
>>> Is it possible in some near futur release to add them ?
>>>
>> This is a matter of libraries, not the language. The standard library
>> coming with raw ocaml distribution is intended to be lightweight and
>> minimal. It is a library like core[1] or batteries[2] that should
>> provide the "standard set" of operations. You can consider filling a
>> feature request ticket.
>>
>> Dawid
>>
>> [1] http://ocaml.janestreet.com/?q=node/13
>> [2] http://batteries.forge.ocamlcore.org/
>>
>> --
>> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
>> https://sympa-roc.inria.fr/wws/info/caml-list
>> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
>> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
>>
>>
>
>
> --
> Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
> https://sympa-roc.inria.fr/wws/info/caml-list
> Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
> Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
>
>

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Re: [Caml-list] Re: Arithmetic operations

[Erik de Castro Lopo]

Christophe Papazian wrote:

> Selling cars without tires !
> 
> This is a huge problem of the ocaml community. Who wants a minimal  
> library ?
> What makes other languages popular ? There are huge API.
> For Ocaml, the main web site is just for the compiler, the ocaml hump  
> is refreshed
> each month with few new things. So I need to use as well godi (another  
> web site),
> batteries (still in progress, another web site), janestreet (another  
> solution, another
> web site). Everybody is making is own api, which is not very  
> interesting for the end user.

Your view of Ocaml is skewed by your choice of the Apple OS. On
Linux distributions like Debian, Ubuntu and Fedora, a large number
of libraries are available via the distro's packaging system.

I'm running Debian and there are well over 100 Ocaml library 
packages available for installation using apt-get.

Erik
-- 
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Erik de Castro Lopo
http://www.mega-nerd.com/

Re: [Caml-list] Re: Arithmetic operations

[Philippe Strauss]

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Le 31 mars 2011 à 10:19, Pierre-Alexandre Voye a écrit :

> It's funny, because I'm studying why language succeed or not, for my M1 dissertation (M1 Management), and it's one of the big factor, among others, of sucess.
> Ocaml is highly expressive, so you could turn around, but it's a big problem.
> 
> I think it would be important and interesting to create a little organization which discuss bout a standard lib and would begin making a synthesis of all these "standard" library.

Personally I'm not that unhappy with the standard lib shipped by INRIA.

maybe batteries and janestreet core (to name nowadays alternatives) have too big ambitions: extension library aside INRIA's standard lib would have more users than a complete alternative.

the way you can get haskell packaged easily, on the contrary, as some big appeal.

> 
> It would be very interesting too, to  a lot of company which could take advantage of the "0 debug" advantages of caml : This fact imply a lot of cut in software building costs which would be a great advantage for company who would offer service based on OCaml.
> 
> OCaml is now mature, it could be considered out of the laboratory, it thus become able to cross the chasm :
> http://robrozicki.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/crossing_the_chasm1.png
> 
> But making a good compiler with a minimal API isn't sufficient.
> 
> So, in summary :
> - OCaml is ready to cross the chasm, it was too early 10 years ago
> - Ocaml need a huge __standard__ API. And there a lot of work to unify about this
> - Ocaml need a standard lib package management, and some good ones exist for Ocaml


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Re: [Caml-list] Re: Arithmetic operations

[Pierre-Alexandre Voye]

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2011/3/31 Philippe Strauss <philou@philou.ch>

>
> Le 31 mars 2011 à 10:19, Pierre-Alexandre Voye a écrit :
>
> It's funny, because I'm studying why language succeed or not, for my M1
> dissertation (M1 Management), and it's one of the big factor, among others,
> of sucess.
> Ocaml is highly expressive, so you could turn around, but it's a big
> problem.
>
> I think it would be important and interesting to create a little
> organization which discuss bout a standard lib and would begin making a
> synthesis of all these "standard" library.
>
>
> Personally I'm not that unhappy with the standard lib shipped by INRIA.
>
> maybe batteries and janestreet core (to name nowadays alternatives) have
> too big ambitions: extension library aside INRIA's standard lib would have
> more users than a complete alternative.
>
> the way you can get haskell packaged easily, on the contrary, as some big
> appeal.
>
>
> I think INRIA, and in particular the Xavier Leroy's team, make what they
can. Their work isn't to maintain OCaml but mainly to do research.
So, I think INRIA could continue to work on a good compiler, and company
which make business whith ocaml could discuss between them to agreed on
standards, via Ocamlcore for instance, with the agreement of Xavier Leroy's
team of course.


-- 
---------------------
Isaac Project - http://www.lisaac.org/

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Re: [Caml-list] Re: Arithmetic operations

[Gabriel Scherer]

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2011/3/31 Philippe Strauss <philou@philou.ch>

> So, I think INRIA could continue to work on a good compiler, and company
> which make business whith ocaml could discuss between them to agreed on
> standards, via Ocamlcore for instance, with the agreement of Xavier Leroy's
> team of course.
>

Xavier Leroy has already said, for example during the former OCaml Meetings,
that they would be happy to link to a more complete "OCaml distribution"
provided by the community, including the core "INRIA lib" and some more. I
think there is no clear consensus right now on what that would be, and
that's why it hasn't been done yet, but there are several orthogonal efforts
in that direction (more on that later).


2011/3/31 Philippe Strauss <philou@philou.ch>

> maybe batteries and janestreet core (to name nowadays alternatives) have
> too big ambitions: extension library aside INRIA's standard lib would have
> more users than a complete alternative.
>
[...]
>
I think it would be important and interesting to create a little
> organization which discuss bout a standard lib and would begin making a
> synthesis of all these "standard" library.
>

Batteries is meant to be an extension of INRIA's stdlib, as a continuation
of the [Extlib] effort. Great care is taken that a code using the existing
standard library should be able to replace it with Batteries without
changing a line of code. If something breaks when converting to batteries,
it should be filed as a bug.

 [Extlib] http://code.google.com/p/ocaml-extlib/

The Core library from Jane Street has liberated itself from this
conservative position. Programs should be written directly using Core, and
it is not in principle easy to transition from INRIA's stdlib to Core (of
course you could include both and be careful to avoid conflicts with
"open"). The advantages are plenty: it allows Janestreet to provide a
coherent set of packages and make different design choices (arguably some
aspects of INRIA's stdlib are more "non choices"). On the other hand, it
means that direct "synthesis" of both efforts (Core and Batteries) is not
likely. There is also the difference that Batteries is a community-driven
effort, while Core is more internal to Jane Street; they would probably
welcome contributions, but their internal code is naturally their top
priority, and the external release model has been rather sporadic for now.


Le 31 mars 2011 à 10:19, Pierre-Alexandre Voye:

> I think it would be important and interesting to create a little
> organization which discuss bout a standard lib and would begin making a
> synthesis of all these "standard" library.
>

After the first OCaml Meeting, there has been some discussion on the Cocan
Wiki, but I think the site is down currently.

http://le-gall.net/sylvain+violaine/blog/index.php?post/2008/01/30/36-ocamlmeeting-in-paris-debian-summary


2011/3/31 Philippe Strauss <philou@philou.ch>

> the way you can get haskell packaged easily, on the contrary, as some big
> appeal.


Sylvain Le Gall has been working on a CPAN-like repository for OCaml, using
his "oasis" distribution tool:
   http://oasis.forge.ocamlcore.org/oasis-db.html

Sylvain has been doing great work for the OCaml community for some years.
With the help of other tools (ocamlfind, godi, ocamlbuild...), the Ocamlcore
Forge, etc., it is now more and more easy to use, share and deploy OCaml
code. Of course, there still are a lot of rough edges, but the only way to
go further is that the community (yes, you!) try to use those tools,
popularize them, and also report feedback on what could be improved.

For a very long time, using OCaml has been a joyful but solitary activity.
If you want a more vibrant community, the only thing to do is to do your
part of the work as you would need the others to do. Set a standard, so that
things that are now rare are taken for granted in the future. Nobody, except
maybe Sylvain, has the devotion to work full-time on the small details that
will improve things in the long run, and this is ok. Yes, writing an oasis
file (or even a META) or contributing an obvious function to Batteries is
tedious and certainly less sexy that a lot of things you're working on. But
this won't happen magically.



On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 11:38 AM, Pierre-Alexandre Voye <
ontologiae@gmail.com> wrote:

> 2011/3/31 Philippe Strauss <philou@philou.ch>
>
>>
>> Le 31 mars 2011 à 10:19, Pierre-Alexandre Voye a écrit :
>>
>> It's funny, because I'm studying why language succeed or not, for my M1
>> dissertation (M1 Management), and it's one of the big factor, among others,
>> of sucess.
>> Ocaml is highly expressive, so you could turn around, but it's a big
>> problem.
>>
>> I think it would be important and interesting to create a little
>> organization which discuss bout a standard lib and would begin making a
>> synthesis of all these "standard" library.
>>
>>
>> Personally I'm not that unhappy with the standard lib shipped by INRIA.
>>
>> maybe batteries and janestreet core (to name nowadays alternatives) have
>> too big ambitions: extension library aside INRIA's standard lib would have
>> more users than a complete alternative.
>>
>> the way you can get haskell packaged easily, on the contrary, as some big
>> appeal.
>>
>>
>> I think INRIA, and in particular the Xavier Leroy's team, make what they
> can. Their work isn't to maintain OCaml but mainly to do research.
> So, I think INRIA could continue to work on a good compiler, and company
> which make business whith ocaml could discuss between them to agreed on
> standards, via Ocamlcore for instance, with the agreement of Xavier Leroy's
> team of course.
>
>
> --
> ---------------------
> Isaac Project - http://www.lisaac.org/
>

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Re: [Caml-list] Re: Arithmetic operations

[Gerd Stolpmann]

Am Donnerstag, den 31.03.2011, 09:56 +0200 schrieb Christophe Papazian:
> Selling cars without tires !
> 
> This is a huge problem of the ocaml community. Who wants a minimal  
> library ?
> What makes other languages popular ? There are huge API.
> For Ocaml, the main web site is just for the compiler, the ocaml hump  
> is refreshed
> each month with few new things. So I need to use as well godi (another  
> web site),
> batteries (still in progress, another web site), janestreet (another  
> solution, another
> web site). Everybody is making is own api, which is not very  
> interesting for the end user.
> 
> When I use python or latex, eveything is centralized, I pick the  
> packages I need, and all is done.
> Ocaml situation would be understandable if this was something new, but  
> after 15 years, it's just
> the french way : "We have good ideas, but we don't care how to sell  
> them".
> And this must be a reason why ocaml community is still small.

The problem is not the packaging of the software. Actually, we are doing
quite well, given that multiple organizations and individuals feel
responsible.

What is really French thinking is that centralism is good, btw. The
current situation is at least supporting some competition between
solutions. Whether there is one or several APIs is irrelevant as long as
they can be used together. In some sense, this is the "Linux" way of
doing it - only the core of the system is centralized, and for
everything else there is a free market.

We are not living in a time where it is easy to make a language popular.
If you are a company, you have to spend 100 of millions to make this
happen (see what Sun and Microsoft had to spend for their platforms).
And most of that goes into marketing, i.e. paying people for constantly
praising the product.

The main reason why the Ocaml community is small: Functional programming
is not widely taught at Universities (worldwide). Because of this, it
can still be ignored by the industry (remember the industry depends on
the knowledge of the graduates - and it's the graduates who create the
market for jobs, contrary to their own reception of the situation). 

Gerd



> 	Christophe
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Le 30 mars 11 à 14:57, Dawid Toton a écrit :
> 
> >
> >> It would be so good if some missing operations on numbers could be
> >> added to the standard set : (...)
> >> The lack of those functions gives a feeling of immaturity of the
> >> language.
> >> Is it possible in some near futur release to add them ?
> > This is a matter of libraries, not the language. The standard library
> > coming with raw ocaml distribution is intended to be lightweight and
> > minimal. It is a library like core[1] or batteries[2] that should
> > provide the "standard set" of operations. You can consider filling a
> > feature request ticket.
> >
> > Dawid
> >
> > [1] http://ocaml.janestreet.com/?q=node/13
> > [2] http://batteries.forge.ocamlcore.org/
> >
> > -- 
> > Caml-list mailing list.  Subscription management and archives:
> > https://sympa-roc.inria.fr/wws/info/caml-list
> > Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners
> > Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
> >
> 
> 
> 


-- 
------------------------------------------------------------
Gerd Stolpmann, Bad Nauheimer Str.3, 64289 Darmstadt,Germany 
gerd@gerd-stolpmann.de          http://www.gerd-stolpmann.de
Phone: +49-6151-153855                  Fax: +49-6151-997714
------------------------------------------------------------

Re: [Caml-list] Re: Arithmetic operations

[Gabriel Scherer]

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On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 2:39 PM, Philippe Strauss <philou@philou.ch> wrote:

> I became interested in O'Caml due to it's good numbers figures on the
> language shootout perf. comparison back in 2001. It was regulary not far
> behind C/C++.
> Maybe it's a not big big effort to tackle the task of optimizing those
> pesky benchmark to regains some rank and make the community grows again.
>

It was certainly an interesting time, but I don't think it's realistic to
expect that "with some effort, we'll be number 2 on the shootout again".
This specific "benchmark" has been discussed many times in the OCaml
community and others (eg. Haskell), and it has been acknowledged, first and
foremost by the shootout organizers, that you cannot deduce too much from
it. What is measured is not "how fast typical programs of the language are"
but "how fast is the massively tuned version conforming to the arbitrary
rules (like all rules) of this benchmark" (eg. changing the GC settings are
disallowed in benchmarks where that would make a huge difference, and simply
changing the default pool sizes would have big differences on the accepted
result, which is arguably a bit ridiculous).

It may be obvious, but it turns out that massively tuned C program tends to
be faster than massively tuned OCaml programs (because the OCaml compiler is
quite straight wrt. optimization, so you can only tune so much), and that
languages supporting more low-level techniques have an edge here.

It is fair, I think, that new high-level language that were thought to
accommodate well with low-level techniques, such as ATS, or languages with a
fancier concurrency support, score better than OCaml on this benchmark.
OCaml is on par with other well-designed and well-implemented functional
languages such as Haskell or Common Lisp, and still roads ahead most dynamic
languages such as Python or Ruby, or even Javascript (although LuaJIT is
coming close to native speed). There is no reason why OCaml would or should
perform significantly better in the near future.



On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 2:39 PM, Philippe Strauss <philou@philou.ch> wrote:

> just a thought,
>
> I became interested in O'Caml due to it's good numbers figures on the
> language shootout perf. comparison back in 2001. It was regulary not far
> behind C/C++.
> Maybe it's a not big big effort to tackle the task of optimizing those
> pesky benchmark to regains some rank and make the community grows again.
>
> I'm a bit too beginner for the task (mind polluted with imperatives :)
>
> dunnon, once again, just a thought.
>
> Le 31 mars 2011 à 14:19, Gabriel Scherer a écrit :
>
> 2011/3/31 Philippe Strauss <philou@philou.ch>
>
>> So, I think INRIA could continue to work on a good compiler, and company
>> which make business whith ocaml could discuss between them to agreed on
>> standards, via Ocamlcore for instance, with the agreement of Xavier Leroy's
>> team of course.
>>
>
> Xavier Leroy has already said, for example during the former OCaml
> Meetings, that they would be happy to link to a more complete "OCaml
> distribution" provided by the community, including the core "INRIA lib" and
> some more. I think there is no clear consensus right now on what that would
> be, and that's why it hasn't been done yet, but there are several orthogonal
> efforts in that direction (more on that later).
>
>
> 2011/3/31 Philippe Strauss <philou@philou.ch>
>
>> maybe batteries and janestreet core (to name nowadays alternatives) have
>> too big ambitions: extension library aside INRIA's standard lib would have
>> more users than a complete alternative.
>>
> [...]
>>
> I think it would be important and interesting to create a little
>> organization which discuss bout a standard lib and would begin making a
>> synthesis of all these "standard" library.
>>
>
> Batteries is meant to be an extension of INRIA's stdlib, as a continuation
> of the [Extlib] effort. Great care is taken that a code using the existing
> standard library should be able to replace it with Batteries without
> changing a line of code. If something breaks when converting to batteries,
> it should be filed as a bug.
>
>  [Extlib] http://code.google.com/p/ocaml-extlib/
>
> The Core library from Jane Street has liberated itself from this
> conservative position. Programs should be written directly using Core, and
> it is not in principle easy to transition from INRIA's stdlib to Core (of
> course you could include both and be careful to avoid conflicts with
> "open"). The advantages are plenty: it allows Janestreet to provide a
> coherent set of packages and make different design choices (arguably some
> aspects of INRIA's stdlib are more "non choices"). On the other hand, it
> means that direct "synthesis" of both efforts (Core and Batteries) is not
> likely. There is also the difference that Batteries is a community-driven
> effort, while Core is more internal to Jane Street; they would probably
> welcome contributions, but their internal code is naturally their top
> priority, and the external release model has been rather sporadic for now.
>
>
> Le 31 mars 2011 à 10:19, Pierre-Alexandre Voye:
>
>> I think it would be important and interesting to create a little
>> organization which discuss bout a standard lib and would begin making a
>> synthesis of all these "standard" library.
>>
>
> After the first OCaml Meeting, there has been some discussion on the Cocan
> Wiki, but I think the site is down currently.
>
> http://le-gall.net/sylvain+violaine/blog/index.php?post/2008/01/30/36-ocamlmeeting-in-paris-debian-summary
>
>
> 2011/3/31 Philippe Strauss <philou@philou.ch>
>
>> the way you can get haskell packaged easily, on the contrary, as some big
>> appeal.
>
>
> Sylvain Le Gall has been working on a CPAN-like repository for OCaml, using
> his "oasis" distribution tool:
>    http://oasis.forge.ocamlcore.org/oasis-db.html
>
> Sylvain has been doing great work for the OCaml community for some years.
> With the help of other tools (ocamlfind, godi, ocamlbuild...), the Ocamlcore
> Forge, etc., it is now more and more easy to use, share and deploy OCaml
> code. Of course, there still are a lot of rough edges, but the only way to
> go further is that the community (yes, you!) try to use those tools,
> popularize them, and also report feedback on what could be improved.
>
> For a very long time, using OCaml has been a joyful but solitary activity.
> If you want a more vibrant community, the only thing to do is to do your
> part of the work as you would need the others to do. Set a standard, so that
> things that are now rare are taken for granted in the future. Nobody, except
> maybe Sylvain, has the devotion to work full-time on the small details that
> will improve things in the long run, and this is ok. Yes, writing an oasis
> file (or even a META) or contributing an obvious function to Batteries is
> tedious and certainly less sexy that a lot of things you're working on. But
> this won't happen magically.
>
>
>
> On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 11:38 AM, Pierre-Alexandre Voye <
> ontologiae@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 2011/3/31 Philippe Strauss <philou@philou.ch>
>>
>>>
>>> Le 31 mars 2011 à 10:19, Pierre-Alexandre Voye a écrit :
>>>
>>> It's funny, because I'm studying why language succeed or not, for my M1
>>> dissertation (M1 Management), and it's one of the big factor, among others,
>>> of sucess.
>>> Ocaml is highly expressive, so you could turn around, but it's a big
>>> problem.
>>>
>>> I think it would be important and interesting to create a little
>>> organization which discuss bout a standard lib and would begin making a
>>> synthesis of all these "standard" library.
>>>
>>>
>>> Personally I'm not that unhappy with the standard lib shipped by INRIA.
>>>
>>> maybe batteries and janestreet core (to name nowadays alternatives) have
>>> too big ambitions: extension library aside INRIA's standard lib would have
>>> more users than a complete alternative.
>>>
>>> the way you can get haskell packaged easily, on the contrary, as some big
>>> appeal.
>>>
>>>
>>> I think INRIA, and in particular the Xavier Leroy's team, make what they
>> can. Their work isn't to maintain OCaml but mainly to do research.
>> So, I think INRIA could continue to work on a good compiler, and company
>> which make business whith ocaml could discuss between them to agreed on
>> standards, via Ocamlcore for instance, with the agreement of Xavier Leroy's
>> team of course.
>>
>>
>> --
>> ---------------------
>> Isaac Project - http://www.lisaac.org/
>>
>
>
>

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Re: [Caml-list] Re: Arithmetic operations

[Gabriel Scherer]

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Just a quick clarification :

Sylvain has been doing great work for the OCaml community for some years.
> With the help of other tools (ocamlfind, godi, ocamlbuild...), the Ocamlcore
> Forge, etc., it is now more and more easy to use, share and deploy OCaml
> code.
>

My wording awkwardly suggests that all the mentioned tools are Ocamlcore
projects. This is not true :
- ocamlfind and godi are tools from Gerd Stolpmann and have been around for
much longer; if you want to help the ocaml ecosystem, it's a good idea to
begin by writing META files for all your released projects; they are very
simple to write from an existing example, and very useful in combination
with ocamlfind
- ocamlbuild is from Nicolas Pouillard and Berke Durak; it is a simple and
extensible compilation system for OCaml, but relatively new; other build
systems for OCaml exist, such as OCamlMakefile (a generic GNU Makefile to
help write usual makefiles for OCaml program) and OMake.


On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 2:19 PM, Gabriel Scherer
<gabriel.scherer@gmail.com>wrote:

> 2011/3/31 Philippe Strauss <philou@philou.ch>
>
>> So, I think INRIA could continue to work on a good compiler, and company
>> which make business whith ocaml could discuss between them to agreed on
>> standards, via Ocamlcore for instance, with the agreement of Xavier Leroy's
>> team of course.
>>
>
> Xavier Leroy has already said, for example during the former OCaml
> Meetings, that they would be happy to link to a more complete "OCaml
> distribution" provided by the community, including the core "INRIA lib" and
> some more. I think there is no clear consensus right now on what that would
> be, and that's why it hasn't been done yet, but there are several orthogonal
> efforts in that direction (more on that later).
>
>
> 2011/3/31 Philippe Strauss <philou@philou.ch>
>
>> maybe batteries and janestreet core (to name nowadays alternatives) have
>> too big ambitions: extension library aside INRIA's standard lib would have
>> more users than a complete alternative.
>>
> [...]
>>
> I think it would be important and interesting to create a little
>> organization which discuss bout a standard lib and would begin making a
>> synthesis of all these "standard" library.
>>
>
> Batteries is meant to be an extension of INRIA's stdlib, as a continuation
> of the [Extlib] effort. Great care is taken that a code using the existing
> standard library should be able to replace it with Batteries without
> changing a line of code. If something breaks when converting to batteries,
> it should be filed as a bug.
>
>  [Extlib] http://code.google.com/p/ocaml-extlib/
>
> The Core library from Jane Street has liberated itself from this
> conservative position. Programs should be written directly using Core, and
> it is not in principle easy to transition from INRIA's stdlib to Core (of
> course you could include both and be careful to avoid conflicts with
> "open"). The advantages are plenty: it allows Janestreet to provide a
> coherent set of packages and make different design choices (arguably some
> aspects of INRIA's stdlib are more "non choices"). On the other hand, it
> means that direct "synthesis" of both efforts (Core and Batteries) is not
> likely. There is also the difference that Batteries is a community-driven
> effort, while Core is more internal to Jane Street; they would probably
> welcome contributions, but their internal code is naturally their top
> priority, and the external release model has been rather sporadic for now.
>
>
> Le 31 mars 2011 à 10:19, Pierre-Alexandre Voye:
>
>> I think it would be important and interesting to create a little
>> organization which discuss bout a standard lib and would begin making a
>> synthesis of all these "standard" library.
>>
>
> After the first OCaml Meeting, there has been some discussion on the Cocan
> Wiki, but I think the site is down currently.
>
> http://le-gall.net/sylvain+violaine/blog/index.php?post/2008/01/30/36-ocamlmeeting-in-paris-debian-summary
>
>
> 2011/3/31 Philippe Strauss <philou@philou.ch>
>
>> the way you can get haskell packaged easily, on the contrary, as some big
>> appeal.
>
>
> Sylvain Le Gall has been working on a CPAN-like repository for OCaml, using
> his "oasis" distribution tool:
>    http://oasis.forge.ocamlcore.org/oasis-db.html
>
> Sylvain has been doing great work for the OCaml community for some years.
> With the help of other tools (ocamlfind, godi, ocamlbuild...), the Ocamlcore
> Forge, etc., it is now more and more easy to use, share and deploy OCaml
> code. Of course, there still are a lot of rough edges, but the only way to
> go further is that the community (yes, you!) try to use those tools,
> popularize them, and also report feedback on what could be improved.
>
> For a very long time, using OCaml has been a joyful but solitary activity.
> If you want a more vibrant community, the only thing to do is to do your
> part of the work as you would need the others to do. Set a standard, so that
> things that are now rare are taken for granted in the future. Nobody, except
> maybe Sylvain, has the devotion to work full-time on the small details that
> will improve things in the long run, and this is ok. Yes, writing an oasis
> file (or even a META) or contributing an obvious function to Batteries is
> tedious and certainly less sexy that a lot of things you're working on. But
> this won't happen magically.
>
>
>
>
> On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 11:38 AM, Pierre-Alexandre Voye <
> ontologiae@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 2011/3/31 Philippe Strauss <philou@philou.ch>
>>
>>>
>>> Le 31 mars 2011 à 10:19, Pierre-Alexandre Voye a écrit :
>>>
>>> It's funny, because I'm studying why language succeed or not, for my M1
>>> dissertation (M1 Management), and it's one of the big factor, among others,
>>> of sucess.
>>> Ocaml is highly expressive, so you could turn around, but it's a big
>>> problem.
>>>
>>> I think it would be important and interesting to create a little
>>> organization which discuss bout a standard lib and would begin making a
>>> synthesis of all these "standard" library.
>>>
>>>
>>> Personally I'm not that unhappy with the standard lib shipped by INRIA.
>>>
>>> maybe batteries and janestreet core (to name nowadays alternatives) have
>>> too big ambitions: extension library aside INRIA's standard lib would have
>>> more users than a complete alternative.
>>>
>>> the way you can get haskell packaged easily, on the contrary, as some big
>>> appeal.
>>>
>>>
>>> I think INRIA, and in particular the Xavier Leroy's team, make what they
>> can. Their work isn't to maintain OCaml but mainly to do research.
>> So, I think INRIA could continue to work on a good compiler, and company
>> which make business whith ocaml could discuss between them to agreed on
>> standards, via Ocamlcore for instance, with the agreement of Xavier Leroy's
>> team of course.
>>
>>
>> --
>> ---------------------
>> Isaac Project - http://www.lisaac.org/
>>
>
>

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Re: [Caml-list] Re: Arithmetic operations

[Ashish Agarwal]

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One thing I feel is desperately needed is a better website for OCaml. I'm
trying to organize an effort around this, and Sylvain has offered to host
the website on ocamlcore.org. If you are interested in helping, please
contact me off list. Thank you.


On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 11:52 AM, Gabriel Scherer <gabriel.scherer@gmail.com
> wrote:

> Just a quick clarification :
>
>
> Sylvain has been doing great work for the OCaml community for some years.
>> With the help of other tools (ocamlfind, godi, ocamlbuild...), the Ocamlcore
>> Forge, etc., it is now more and more easy to use, share and deploy OCaml
>> code.
>>
>
> My wording awkwardly suggests that all the mentioned tools are Ocamlcore
> projects. This is not true :
> - ocamlfind and godi are tools from Gerd Stolpmann and have been around for
> much longer; if you want to help the ocaml ecosystem, it's a good idea to
> begin by writing META files for all your released projects; they are very
> simple to write from an existing example, and very useful in combination
> with ocamlfind
> - ocamlbuild is from Nicolas Pouillard and Berke Durak; it is a simple and
> extensible compilation system for OCaml, but relatively new; other build
> systems for OCaml exist, such as OCamlMakefile (a generic GNU Makefile to
> help write usual makefiles for OCaml program) and OMake.
>
>
> On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 2:19 PM, Gabriel Scherer <
> gabriel.scherer@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> 2011/3/31 Philippe Strauss <philou@philou.ch>
>>
>>> So, I think INRIA could continue to work on a good compiler, and company
>>> which make business whith ocaml could discuss between them to agreed on
>>> standards, via Ocamlcore for instance, with the agreement of Xavier Leroy's
>>> team of course.
>>>
>>
>> Xavier Leroy has already said, for example during the former OCaml
>> Meetings, that they would be happy to link to a more complete "OCaml
>> distribution" provided by the community, including the core "INRIA lib" and
>> some more. I think there is no clear consensus right now on what that would
>> be, and that's why it hasn't been done yet, but there are several orthogonal
>> efforts in that direction (more on that later).
>>
>>
>> 2011/3/31 Philippe Strauss <philou@philou.ch>
>>
>>> maybe batteries and janestreet core (to name nowadays alternatives) have
>>> too big ambitions: extension library aside INRIA's standard lib would have
>>> more users than a complete alternative.
>>>
>> [...]
>>>
>> I think it would be important and interesting to create a little
>>> organization which discuss bout a standard lib and would begin making a
>>> synthesis of all these "standard" library.
>>>
>>
>> Batteries is meant to be an extension of INRIA's stdlib, as a continuation
>> of the [Extlib] effort. Great care is taken that a code using the existing
>> standard library should be able to replace it with Batteries without
>> changing a line of code. If something breaks when converting to batteries,
>> it should be filed as a bug.
>>
>>  [Extlib] http://code.google.com/p/ocaml-extlib/
>>
>> The Core library from Jane Street has liberated itself from this
>> conservative position. Programs should be written directly using Core, and
>> it is not in principle easy to transition from INRIA's stdlib to Core (of
>> course you could include both and be careful to avoid conflicts with
>> "open"). The advantages are plenty: it allows Janestreet to provide a
>> coherent set of packages and make different design choices (arguably some
>> aspects of INRIA's stdlib are more "non choices"). On the other hand, it
>> means that direct "synthesis" of both efforts (Core and Batteries) is not
>> likely. There is also the difference that Batteries is a community-driven
>> effort, while Core is more internal to Jane Street; they would probably
>> welcome contributions, but their internal code is naturally their top
>> priority, and the external release model has been rather sporadic for now.
>>
>>
>> Le 31 mars 2011 à 10:19, Pierre-Alexandre Voye:
>>
>>> I think it would be important and interesting to create a little
>>> organization which discuss bout a standard lib and would begin making a
>>> synthesis of all these "standard" library.
>>>
>>
>> After the first OCaml Meeting, there has been some discussion on the Cocan
>> Wiki, but I think the site is down currently.
>>
>> http://le-gall.net/sylvain+violaine/blog/index.php?post/2008/01/30/36-ocamlmeeting-in-paris-debian-summary
>>
>>
>> 2011/3/31 Philippe Strauss <philou@philou.ch>
>>
>>> the way you can get haskell packaged easily, on the contrary, as some big
>>> appeal.
>>
>>
>> Sylvain Le Gall has been working on a CPAN-like repository for OCaml,
>> using his "oasis" distribution tool:
>>    http://oasis.forge.ocamlcore.org/oasis-db.html
>>
>> Sylvain has been doing great work for the OCaml community for some years.
>> With the help of other tools (ocamlfind, godi, ocamlbuild...), the Ocamlcore
>> Forge, etc., it is now more and more easy to use, share and deploy OCaml
>> code. Of course, there still are a lot of rough edges, but the only way to
>> go further is that the community (yes, you!) try to use those tools,
>> popularize them, and also report feedback on what could be improved.
>>
>> For a very long time, using OCaml has been a joyful but solitary activity.
>> If you want a more vibrant community, the only thing to do is to do your
>> part of the work as you would need the others to do. Set a standard, so that
>> things that are now rare are taken for granted in the future. Nobody, except
>> maybe Sylvain, has the devotion to work full-time on the small details that
>> will improve things in the long run, and this is ok. Yes, writing an oasis
>> file (or even a META) or contributing an obvious function to Batteries is
>> tedious and certainly less sexy that a lot of things you're working on. But
>> this won't happen magically.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 11:38 AM, Pierre-Alexandre Voye <
>> ontologiae@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> 2011/3/31 Philippe Strauss <philou@philou.ch>
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Le 31 mars 2011 à 10:19, Pierre-Alexandre Voye a écrit :
>>>>
>>>> It's funny, because I'm studying why language succeed or not, for my M1
>>>> dissertation (M1 Management), and it's one of the big factor, among others,
>>>> of sucess.
>>>> Ocaml is highly expressive, so you could turn around, but it's a big
>>>> problem.
>>>>
>>>> I think it would be important and interesting to create a little
>>>> organization which discuss bout a standard lib and would begin making a
>>>> synthesis of all these "standard" library.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Personally I'm not that unhappy with the standard lib shipped by INRIA.
>>>>
>>>> maybe batteries and janestreet core (to name nowadays alternatives) have
>>>> too big ambitions: extension library aside INRIA's standard lib would have
>>>> more users than a complete alternative.
>>>>
>>>> the way you can get haskell packaged easily, on the contrary, as some
>>>> big appeal.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> I think INRIA, and in particular the Xavier Leroy's team, make what they
>>> can. Their work isn't to maintain OCaml but mainly to do research.
>>> So, I think INRIA could continue to work on a good compiler, and company
>>> which make business whith ocaml could discuss between them to agreed on
>>> standards, via Ocamlcore for instance, with the agreement of Xavier Leroy's
>>> team of course.
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> ---------------------
>>> Isaac Project - http://www.lisaac.org/
>>>
>>
>>
>

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Re: [Caml-list] Re: Arithmetic operations

[Anthony Tavener]

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Yes, an informative, grokable site would be nice! So often with OCaml
projects I just don't know what they're for and the sites provide bare-bones
info. As a recent example, I saw OASIS mentioned a few times here so I
checked the site... but the most informative thing there was the link to
Haskell's Cabal. After I read the Cabal page, then I understood the intended
role of OASIS.

OCaml stuff seems to lack *exposition*... a description of intent. Too often
it's very terse "this is what it is" with no "this is why it exists and how
you use it".

Bigger than that, what is a practical OCaml setup? I'm still basically
running with the compiler, some specifically downloaded modules, and "my own
stdlib". If I manage my OCaml environment with GODI, will I run into
limitations, or is everyone using it and it's purely beneficial? I have no
idea what an appropriate setup is, and don't want to spend time trying to
figure it out myself and possibly messing up the ad-hoc configuration I've
ended up with. Advice from those with experience would be welcome.

Perhaps other developers run into the same issues. The only known is the
compiler... need that. Some confusions arise from the split choices...
P4/P5... ocamlbuild/makefile. And you don't find out what choice to make
until you hit a problem. What do you experts do in practice? That's the kind
of overview I feel is missing. There's no place to go (that I've seen) where
a practical OCaml environment(s) is(/are) described... perhaps because it
would require being partisan to one choice or another. At least info to help
make that choice. It seems every time I consider doing a camlp4 extension I
look up camlp4 vs camlp5 and after my brain turns to fuzz I give up and do
something else.

I've been programming in OCaml for about 6 years now, and if I were to start
with a clean build, I'd still just build the basic package from INRIA and
gather specific modules as I needed them... often the "install" is just
copying the  library/object/mli files into a subdir of .../lib/ocaml. There
must be a better way? What I need is guidance. :)

Without any direction, I think OCaml developers end up "going their own",
and we have this fractured mess. People don't know if the functions they
need (such as fairly basic math functions, to touch on the original topic)
exist somewhere. I didn't know about extlib or batteries for some time.
Where do you start? Google is not the most friendly or useful interface for
poor, under-represented OCaml. :)

So yes, Ashish, I think a better website for OCaml could be a simple and
effective way to address these problems!


On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 10:45 AM, Ashish Agarwal <agarwal1975@gmail.com>wrote:

> One thing I feel is desperately needed is a better website for OCaml. I'm
> trying to organize an effort around this, and Sylvain has offered to host
> the website on ocamlcore.org. If you are interested in helping, please
> contact me off list. Thank you.
>
>
> On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 11:52 AM, Gabriel Scherer <
> gabriel.scherer@gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Just a quick clarification :
>>
>>
>> Sylvain has been doing great work for the OCaml community for some years.
>>> With the help of other tools (ocamlfind, godi, ocamlbuild...), the Ocamlcore
>>> Forge, etc., it is now more and more easy to use, share and deploy OCaml
>>> code.
>>>
>>
>> My wording awkwardly suggests that all the mentioned tools are Ocamlcore
>> projects. This is not true :
>> - ocamlfind and godi are tools from Gerd Stolpmann and have been around
>> for much longer; if you want to help the ocaml ecosystem, it's a good idea
>> to begin by writing META files for all your released projects; they are very
>> simple to write from an existing example, and very useful in combination
>> with ocamlfind
>> - ocamlbuild is from Nicolas Pouillard and Berke Durak; it is a simple and
>> extensible compilation system for OCaml, but relatively new; other build
>> systems for OCaml exist, such as OCamlMakefile (a generic GNU Makefile to
>> help write usual makefiles for OCaml program) and OMake.
>>
>>
>> On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 2:19 PM, Gabriel Scherer <
>> gabriel.scherer@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> 2011/3/31 Philippe Strauss <philou@philou.ch>
>>>
>>>> So, I think INRIA could continue to work on a good compiler, and company
>>>> which make business whith ocaml could discuss between them to agreed on
>>>> standards, via Ocamlcore for instance, with the agreement of Xavier Leroy's
>>>> team of course.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Xavier Leroy has already said, for example during the former OCaml
>>> Meetings, that they would be happy to link to a more complete "OCaml
>>> distribution" provided by the community, including the core "INRIA lib" and
>>> some more. I think there is no clear consensus right now on what that would
>>> be, and that's why it hasn't been done yet, but there are several orthogonal
>>> efforts in that direction (more on that later).
>>>
>>>
>>> 2011/3/31 Philippe Strauss <philou@philou.ch>
>>>
>>>> maybe batteries and janestreet core (to name nowadays alternatives) have
>>>> too big ambitions: extension library aside INRIA's standard lib would have
>>>> more users than a complete alternative.
>>>>
>>> [...]
>>>>
>>> I think it would be important and interesting to create a little
>>>> organization which discuss bout a standard lib and would begin making a
>>>> synthesis of all these "standard" library.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Batteries is meant to be an extension of INRIA's stdlib, as a
>>> continuation of the [Extlib] effort. Great care is taken that a code using
>>> the existing standard library should be able to replace it with Batteries
>>> without changing a line of code. If something breaks when converting to
>>> batteries, it should be filed as a bug.
>>>
>>>  [Extlib] http://code.google.com/p/ocaml-extlib/
>>>
>>> The Core library from Jane Street has liberated itself from this
>>> conservative position. Programs should be written directly using Core, and
>>> it is not in principle easy to transition from INRIA's stdlib to Core (of
>>> course you could include both and be careful to avoid conflicts with
>>> "open"). The advantages are plenty: it allows Janestreet to provide a
>>> coherent set of packages and make different design choices (arguably some
>>> aspects of INRIA's stdlib are more "non choices"). On the other hand, it
>>> means that direct "synthesis" of both efforts (Core and Batteries) is not
>>> likely. There is also the difference that Batteries is a community-driven
>>> effort, while Core is more internal to Jane Street; they would probably
>>> welcome contributions, but their internal code is naturally their top
>>> priority, and the external release model has been rather sporadic for now.
>>>
>>>
>>> Le 31 mars 2011 à 10:19, Pierre-Alexandre Voye:
>>>
>>>> I think it would be important and interesting to create a little
>>>> organization which discuss bout a standard lib and would begin making a
>>>> synthesis of all these "standard" library.
>>>>
>>>
>>> After the first OCaml Meeting, there has been some discussion on the
>>> Cocan Wiki, but I think the site is down currently.
>>>
>>> http://le-gall.net/sylvain+violaine/blog/index.php?post/2008/01/30/36-ocamlmeeting-in-paris-debian-summary
>>>
>>>
>>> 2011/3/31 Philippe Strauss <philou@philou.ch>
>>>
>>>> the way you can get haskell packaged easily, on the contrary, as some
>>>> big appeal.
>>>
>>>
>>> Sylvain Le Gall has been working on a CPAN-like repository for OCaml,
>>> using his "oasis" distribution tool:
>>>    http://oasis.forge.ocamlcore.org/oasis-db.html
>>>
>>> Sylvain has been doing great work for the OCaml community for some years.
>>> With the help of other tools (ocamlfind, godi, ocamlbuild...), the Ocamlcore
>>> Forge, etc., it is now more and more easy to use, share and deploy OCaml
>>> code. Of course, there still are a lot of rough edges, but the only way to
>>> go further is that the community (yes, you!) try to use those tools,
>>> popularize them, and also report feedback on what could be improved.
>>>
>>> For a very long time, using OCaml has been a joyful but solitary
>>> activity. If you want a more vibrant community, the only thing to do is to
>>> do your part of the work as you would need the others to do. Set a standard,
>>> so that things that are now rare are taken for granted in the future.
>>> Nobody, except maybe Sylvain, has the devotion to work full-time on the
>>> small details that will improve things in the long run, and this is ok. Yes,
>>> writing an oasis file (or even a META) or contributing an obvious function
>>> to Batteries is tedious and certainly less sexy that a lot of things you're
>>> working on. But this won't happen magically.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 11:38 AM, Pierre-Alexandre Voye <
>>> ontologiae@gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> 2011/3/31 Philippe Strauss <philou@philou.ch>
>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Le 31 mars 2011 à 10:19, Pierre-Alexandre Voye a écrit :
>>>>>
>>>>> It's funny, because I'm studying why language succeed or not, for my M1
>>>>> dissertation (M1 Management), and it's one of the big factor, among others,
>>>>> of sucess.
>>>>> Ocaml is highly expressive, so you could turn around, but it's a big
>>>>> problem.
>>>>>
>>>>> I think it would be important and interesting to create a little
>>>>> organization which discuss bout a standard lib and would begin making a
>>>>> synthesis of all these "standard" library.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> Personally I'm not that unhappy with the standard lib shipped by INRIA.
>>>>>
>>>>> maybe batteries and janestreet core (to name nowadays alternatives)
>>>>> have too big ambitions: extension library aside INRIA's standard lib would
>>>>> have more users than a complete alternative.
>>>>>
>>>>> the way you can get haskell packaged easily, on the contrary, as some
>>>>> big appeal.
>>>>>
>>>>>
>>>>> I think INRIA, and in particular the Xavier Leroy's team, make what
>>>> they can. Their work isn't to maintain OCaml but mainly to do research.
>>>> So, I think INRIA could continue to work on a good compiler, and company
>>>> which make business whith ocaml could discuss between them to agreed on
>>>> standards, via Ocamlcore for instance, with the agreement of Xavier Leroy's
>>>> team of course.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> --
>>>> ---------------------
>>>> Isaac Project - http://www.lisaac.org/
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>

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Re: [Caml-list] Re: Arithmetic operations

[Gerd Stolpmann]

Am Donnerstag, den 31.03.2011, 12:13 -0600 schrieb Anthony Tavener:
> Yes, an informative, grokable site would be nice! So often with OCaml
> projects I just don't know what they're for and the sites provide
> bare-bones info. As a recent example, I saw OASIS mentioned a few
> times here so I checked the site... but the most informative thing
> there was the link to Haskell's Cabal. After I read the Cabal page,
> then I understood the intended role of OASIS.
> 
> 
> OCaml stuff seems to lack *exposition*... a description of intent. Too
> often it's very terse "this is what it is" with no "this is why it
> exists and how you use it".

This is a point. There is not enough information available how to do
things practically. Maybe we can encourage people to blog more about
this stuff? I think such articles - in the sense of descriptions which
steps to take, and what the result will be - could be very valuable.

> Bigger than that, what is a practical OCaml setup? I'm still basically
> running with the compiler, some specifically downloaded modules, and
> "my own stdlib". If I manage my OCaml environment with GODI, will I
> run into limitations, or is everyone using it and it's purely
> beneficial? I have no idea what an appropriate setup is, and don't
> want to spend time trying to figure it out myself and possibly messing
> up the ad-hoc configuration I've ended up with. Advice from those with
> experience would be welcome.

In general you have two choices: Take a distribution (GODI, Debian,
Fedora, ...), or do everything yourself. If you choose the first option,
you have quickly a running environment, but maybe it is here and there
incomplete, or the distribution contains outdated packages where it is
important for you to have the latest. Except of this, I don't see any
disadvantages in taking a distribution.

If you do everything yourself, you have more control, but it is far more
adventurous, and it is some work to get everything installed. If you
want to upgrade something, you have to rebuild your setup partially.
IMHO, this option is close to impossible for an individual, because you
spend too much time for rebuilding packages. For companies it is an
option, but it is still a lot of work.

It is generally also possible to take a distribution as basis, and
install packages on top of it manually (just be careful not to overwrite
anything).

> Perhaps other developers run into the same issues. The only known is
> the compiler... need that. Some confusions arise from the split
> choices... P4/P5... ocamlbuild/makefile. 

There is also omake, and it is really a recommendation.

> And you don't find out what choice to make until you hit a problem.
> What do you experts do in practice? That's the kind of overview I feel
> is missing. 

Right, the only way to find out is to try it.

> There's no place to go (that I've seen) where a practical OCaml
> environment(s) is(/are) described... perhaps because it would require
> being partisan to one choice or another. At least info to help make
> that choice. It seems every time I consider doing a camlp4 extension I
> look up camlp4 vs camlp5 and after my brain turns to fuzz I give up
> and do something else.

Well, that's an issue that even puts off experts. In any way,
camlp4/p5-based syntax extensions have had high maintenance costs in the
past, and there is the question whether to avoid it at all. Back to the
old times, and use generators.

> I've been programming in OCaml for about 6 years now, and if I were to
> start with a clean build, I'd still just build the basic package from
> INRIA and gather specific modules as I needed them... often the
> "install" is just copying the  library/object/mli files into a subdir
> of .../lib/ocaml. There must be a better way? What I need is
> guidance. :)

Right, propagate findlib (ocamlfind) which exactly tackles this problem.

> Without any direction, I think OCaml developers end up "going their
> own", and we have this fractured mess. People don't know if the
> functions they need (such as fairly basic math functions, to touch on
> the original topic) exist somewhere. I didn't know about extlib or
> batteries for some time. Where do you start? Google is not the most
> friendly or useful interface for poor, under-represented OCaml. :)

IMHO, these attempts to improve/extend the stdlib created more chaos
than they solved. You don't need an extended stdlib for programming.
Although lean, the Ocaml stdlib is a good one.

In addition to this, I often use libraries to solve specific problems
(e.g. PXP for XML-parsing, Ocamlnet for doing some HTTP, or json-wheel
for juggling with JSON). That's what libraries are good for.

Gerd

> So yes, Ashish, I think a better website for OCaml could be a simple
> and effective way to address these problems!
> 
> 
> 
> On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 10:45 AM, Ashish Agarwal
> <agarwal1975@gmail.com> wrote:
>         One thing I feel is desperately needed is a better website for
>         OCaml. I'm trying to organize an effort around this, and
>         Sylvain has offered to host the website on ocamlcore.org. If
>         you are interested in helping, please contact me off list.
>         Thank you.
>         
>         
>         
>         On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 11:52 AM, Gabriel Scherer
>         <gabriel.scherer@gmail.com> wrote:
>                 Just a quick clarification :
>                 
>                 
>                         Sylvain has been doing great work for the
>                         OCaml community for some years. With the help
>                         of other tools (ocamlfind, godi,
>                         ocamlbuild...), the Ocamlcore Forge, etc., it
>                         is now more and more easy to use, share and
>                         deploy OCaml code.
>                 
>                 My wording awkwardly suggests that all the mentioned
>                 tools are Ocamlcore projects. This is not true :
>                 - ocamlfind and godi are tools from Gerd Stolpmann and
>                 have been around for much longer; if you want to help
>                 the ocaml ecosystem, it's a good idea to begin by
>                 writing META files for all your released projects;
>                 they are very simple to write from an existing
>                 example, and very useful in combination with ocamlfind
>                 - ocamlbuild is from Nicolas Pouillard and Berke
>                 Durak; it is a simple and extensible compilation
>                 system for OCaml, but relatively new; other build
>                 systems for OCaml exist, such as OCamlMakefile (a
>                 generic GNU Makefile to help write usual makefiles for
>                 OCaml program) and OMake.
>                 
>                 
>                 
>                 
>                 On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 2:19 PM, Gabriel Scherer
>                 <gabriel.scherer@gmail.com> wrote:
>                         2011/3/31 Philippe Strauss <philou@philou.ch>
>                         
>                                 So, I think INRIA could continue to
>                                 work on a good compiler, and company
>                                 which make business whith ocaml could
>                                 discuss between them to agreed on
>                                 standards, via Ocamlcore for instance,
>                                 with the agreement of Xavier Leroy's
>                                 team of course.
>                         
>                         Xavier Leroy has already said, for example
>                         during the former OCaml Meetings, that they
>                         would be happy to link to a more complete
>                         "OCaml distribution" provided by the
>                         community, including the core "INRIA lib" and
>                         some more. I think there is no clear consensus
>                         right now on what that would be, and that's
>                         why it hasn't been done yet, but there are
>                         several orthogonal efforts in that direction
>                         (more on that later).
>                         
>                         
>                         2011/3/31 Philippe Strauss <philou@philou.ch>
>                         
>                                 maybe batteries and janestreet core
>                                 (to name nowadays alternatives) have
>                                 too big ambitions: extension library
>                                 aside INRIA's standard lib would have
>                                 more users than a complete
>                                 alternative.
>                                 [...] 
>                                 
>                                 I think it would be important and
>                                 interesting to create a little
>                                 organization which discuss bout a
>                                 standard lib and would begin making a
>                                 synthesis of all these "standard"
>                                 library.
>                         
>                         
>                         Batteries is meant to be an extension of
>                         INRIA's stdlib, as a continuation of the
>                         [Extlib] effort. Great care is taken that a
>                         code using the existing standard library
>                         should be able to replace it with Batteries
>                         without changing a line of code. If something
>                         breaks when converting to batteries, it should
>                         be filed as a bug.
>                         
>                          [Extlib]
>                         http://code.google.com/p/ocaml-extlib/
>                         
>                         The Core library from Jane Street has
>                         liberated itself from this conservative
>                         position. Programs should be written directly
>                         using Core, and it is not in principle easy to
>                         transition from INRIA's stdlib to Core (of
>                         course you could include both and be careful
>                         to avoid conflicts with "open"). The
>                         advantages are plenty: it allows Janestreet to
>                         provide a coherent set of packages and make
>                         different design choices (arguably some
>                         aspects of INRIA's stdlib are more "non
>                         choices"). On the other hand, it means that
>                         direct "synthesis" of both efforts (Core and
>                         Batteries) is not likely. There is also the
>                         difference that Batteries is a
>                         community-driven effort, while Core is more
>                         internal to Jane Street; they would probably
>                         welcome contributions, but their internal code
>                         is naturally their top priority, and the
>                         external release model has been rather
>                         sporadic for now.
>                         
>                         
>                         Le 31 mars 2011 à 10:19, Pierre-Alexandre
>                         Voye:
>                         
>                                 I think it would be important and
>                                 interesting to create a little
>                                 organization which discuss bout a
>                                 standard lib and would begin making a
>                                 synthesis of all these "standard"
>                                 library.
>                         
>                         After the first OCaml Meeting, there has been
>                         some discussion on the Cocan Wiki, but I think
>                         the site is down currently.
>                           http://le-gall.net/sylvain
>                         +violaine/blog/index.php?post/2008/01/30/36-ocamlmeeting-in-paris-debian-summary
>                         
>                         
>                         
>                         2011/3/31 Philippe Strauss <philou@philou.ch>
>                         
>                                 the way you can get haskell packaged
>                                 easily, on the contrary, as some big
>                                 appeal.
>                         
>                         Sylvain Le Gall has been working on a
>                         CPAN-like repository for OCaml, using his
>                         "oasis" distribution tool:
>                         
>                         http://oasis.forge.ocamlcore.org/oasis-db.html
>                         
>                         
>                         Sylvain has been doing great work for the
>                         OCaml community for some years. With the help
>                         of other tools (ocamlfind, godi,
>                         ocamlbuild...), the Ocamlcore Forge, etc., it
>                         is now more and more easy to use, share and
>                         deploy OCaml code. Of course, there still are
>                         a lot of rough edges, but the only way to go
>                         further is that the community (yes, you!) try
>                         to use those tools, popularize them, and also
>                         report feedback on what could be improved.
>                         
>                         For a very long time, using OCaml has been a
>                         joyful but solitary activity. If you want a
>                         more vibrant community, the only thing to do
>                         is to do your part of the work as you would
>                         need the others to do. Set a standard, so that
>                         things that are now rare are taken for granted
>                         in the future. Nobody, except maybe Sylvain,
>                         has the devotion to work full-time on the
>                         small details that will improve things in the
>                         long run, and this is ok. Yes, writing an
>                         oasis file (or even a META) or contributing an
>                         obvious function to Batteries is tedious and
>                         certainly less sexy that a lot of things
>                         you're working on. But this won't happen
>                         magically.
>                         
>                         
>                         
>                         
>                         
>                         On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 11:38 AM,
>                         Pierre-Alexandre Voye <ontologiae@gmail.com>
>                         wrote:
>                                 2011/3/31 Philippe Strauss
>                                 <philou@philou.ch>
>                                         
>                                         Le 31 mars 2011 à 10:19,
>                                         Pierre-Alexandre Voye a
>                                         écrit :
>                                         
>                                         > It's funny, because I'm
>                                         > studying why language
>                                         > succeed or not, for my M1
>                                         > dissertation (M1
>                                         > Management), and it's one of
>                                         > the big factor, among
>                                         > others, of sucess.
>                                         > Ocaml is highly expressive,
>                                         > so you could turn around,
>                                         > but it's a big problem.
>                                         > 
>                                         > I think it would be
>                                         > important and interesting to
>                                         > create a little organization
>                                         > which discuss bout a
>                                         > standard lib and would begin
>                                         > making a synthesis of all
>                                         > these "standard" library.
>                                         
>                                         
>                                         Personally I'm not that
>                                         unhappy with the standard lib
>                                         shipped by INRIA.
>                                         
>                                         
>                                         maybe batteries and janestreet
>                                         core (to name nowadays
>                                         alternatives) have too big
>                                         ambitions: extension library
>                                         aside INRIA's standard lib
>                                         would have more users than a
>                                         complete alternative.
>                                         
>                                         
>                                         the way you can get haskell
>                                         packaged easily, on the
>                                         contrary, as some big appeal.
>                                         
>                                         
>                                         
>                                 I think INRIA, and in particular the
>                                 Xavier Leroy's team, make what they
>                                 can. Their work isn't to maintain
>                                 OCaml but mainly to do research.
>                                 So, I think INRIA could continue to
>                                 work on a good compiler, and company
>                                 which make business whith ocaml could
>                                 discuss between them to agreed on
>                                 standards, via Ocamlcore for instance,
>                                 with the agreement of Xavier Leroy's
>                                 team of course.
>                                 
>                                 
>                                 
>                                 
>                                 -- 
>                                 ---------------------
>                                 Isaac Project - http://www.lisaac.org/
>                                 
>                         
>                 
>                 
>         
>         
> 
> 


-- 
------------------------------------------------------------
Gerd Stolpmann, Bad Nauheimer Str.3, 64289 Darmstadt,Germany 
gerd@gerd-stolpmann.de          http://www.gerd-stolpmann.de
Phone: +49-6151-153855                  Fax: +49-6151-997714
------------------------------------------------------------

Re: [Caml-list] Re: Arithmetic operations

[Yaron Minsky]

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On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 8:19 AM, Gabriel Scherer
<gabriel.scherer@gmail.com>wrote:

>  but their internal code is naturally their top priority, and the external
> release model has been rather sporadic for now.
>

This has certainly been true, but Till has done good work in simplifying the
process of generating a release, and we should be able to do releases far
more often now.


y

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