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Date: Fri, 21 Apr 2000 12:56:52 -0700 (PDT)
From: Brian Rogoff <bpr@best.com>
To: John Max Skaller <skaller@maxtal.com.au>
cc: Markus Mottl <mottl@miss.wu-wien.ac.at>, Brian Rogoff <bpr@best.com>,
        OCAML <caml-list@inria.fr>
Subject: Re: When functional languages can be accepted by industry?
In-Reply-To: <3900A74E.A5C17D01@maxtal.com.au>
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On Sat, 22 Apr 2000, John Max Skaller wrote:
> Markus Mottl wrote:
> >I believe that OCaml could be a
> > serious threat to some scripting languages: partly due to its high
> > performance, partly, because it is much saner = easier to maintain, and
> > highly portable! The Unix-library is very complete and would also play an
> > important role here.
> 
> For me, it has deficiency as a scripting language: interactive
> (command prompt) use is clumbsy because gnu-readline isn't integrated:
> no history or editing. [This should be easy to fix: there's some code
> in the Vyper.sourceforge.net repository which might be adapted.]

I use ile on Solaris and that fixes that. There is an OCaml line editor
"ledit" which has this functionality too, but seeing as there is now 
version skew between CamlP4 and OCaml that may not work for you, as it 
uses the Righteous syntax.

BTW, I'd also like OCaml to be faster in general than C++ (and Fortran and 
hand coded assembler :-) but I don't buy the claim that 10% is significant 
for most applications. In general, OCaml is far faster than C++: to write 
and debug. Thats the reason I use a high level language. Debugging C++ is
no fun, especially those crazy error messages that heavy template usage 
seems to bring. 

-- Brian