Worsening standard library

Worsening standard library

[Serge]

Gentlemen!

I think this might be kinda offtopic, but nevertheless. OCaml is being
extensively employed for educational purposes, and it looks like it is
still missing an important feature - the one of easy reading numbers
(integers/floats/doubles) from, say, standard input. You have to read
lines and parse numbers out of them. For instance, in Pascal it was
possible to do "read(x)". 

Absence of such feature distracts people from trying to program sensible
things in OCaml. It would be nice to have such functionality in the
standard library.

I do not wish to start a rant like "let us include simplex method in the
std since it is gravely important" etc., but I do think that _ability to
read numbers from stdin in a standard way_ is very important for the
language like OCaml - because students want it very much, and it is not
ugly in any way.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Serge S. Bityukov, Moscow State University, Dept of Mechanics and Mathematics

Re: [Caml-list] Worsening standard library

[David Brown]

On Thu, Nov 04, 2004 at 12:11:08AM +0300, Serge wrote:

> I do not wish to start a rant like "let us include simplex method in the
> std since it is gravely important" etc., but I do think that _ability to
> read numbers from stdin in a standard way_ is very important for the
> language like OCaml - because students want it very much, and it is not
> ugly in any way.

Any reason not to use 'scanf'?

Dave

Re: [Caml-list] Worsening standard library

[Serge]

> Any reason not to use 'scanf'?

Complexity. I do not mind having scanf, but using it requires
some understanding of modules, format strings and polymorphic types. And
people are unlikely to get bothered by these as soon as they are unable to
feed numbers into their simple programs. That's the catch. Reading numbers
should hardly be more complicated than reading strings, IMHO.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
 Serge S. Bityukov, Moscow State University, Dept of Mechanics and Mathematics

Re: [Caml-list] Worsening standard library

[Manos Renieris]

read_int
read_line
read_float 

are all in Pervasives.

-- Manos

On Thu, Nov 04, 2004 at 12:11:08AM +0300, Serge wrote:
> 
> Gentlemen!
> 
> I think this might be kinda offtopic, but nevertheless. OCaml is being
> extensively employed for educational purposes, and it looks like it is
> still missing an important feature - the one of easy reading numbers
> (integers/floats/doubles) from, say, standard input. You have to read
> lines and parse numbers out of them. For instance, in Pascal it was
> possible to do "read(x)". 
> 
> Absence of such feature distracts people from trying to program sensible
> things in OCaml. It would be nice to have such functionality in the
> standard library.
> 
> I do not wish to start a rant like "let us include simplex method in the
> std since it is gravely important" etc., but I do think that _ability to
> read numbers from stdin in a standard way_ is very important for the
> language like OCaml - because students want it very much, and it is not
> ugly in any way.
> 
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>  Serge S. Bityukov, Moscow State University, Dept of Mechanics and Mathematics
> 
> 
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Re: [Caml-list] Worsening standard library

[sejourne_kevin]

Serge a écrit :
> Gentlemen!
> 
> I think this might be kinda offtopic, but nevertheless. OCaml is being
> extensively employed for educational purposes, and it looks like it is
> still missing an important feature - the one of easy reading numbers
> (integers/floats/doubles) from, say, standard input. You have to read
> lines and parse numbers out of them. For instance, in Pascal it was
> possible to do "read(x)". 
There is some functions for doing that:
Pervasives.read_line
Pervasives.read_int
Pervasives.read_float