Re: [Caml-list] How to do this properly with OCaml?

[Brian Hurt <bhurt@spnz.org>]

On Tue, 26 Jul 2005, Jere Sanisalo wrote:

> On Mon, Jul 25, 2005 at 07:47:16PM -0500, Brian Hurt wrote:
>>> The language requirements with respect to initialisation
>>> are the difference: Ocaml requires all store to be
>>> initialised, C/C++ does not.
>> Yep.  The following C code is really hard to implement in Ocaml:
>>    char * ptr = (char *) 0xA00000ul;
>>    ptr[315] = 'a';
>> I consider this an advantage of Ocaml over C/C++.
>
> Depends on the task.. What if it was a hardware driver?

Hardware drivers are specialized tasks.  One thing that drives me crazy is 
the assumption that a language needs to be able to do everything, and if 
it can't, it can't do anything.

> More so, it's not
> the language, it's the things you can do with it, coupled with the APIs
> possible and already present. I know I'm already favoring .NET as a general
> platform for API tools in the gaming world. The games still need to be fast,
> so C++ for them for now, but C# (and others) solve the tool problem quite
> nicely. And the .NET library is not the least of the reasons; it's easy to
> do so.

Note that languages encourage or discourage certain styles of programming. 
For example, C++, and to a lesser extent Java and C#, rather strongly 
discourages an applicative style of programming- primarily due to the 
costs of allocation.  You can do it, but it's going to be a fairly serious 
perfomance hit.  Ocaml, on the other hand, discourages an imperitive style 
of programming.  There's no performance hit, but there are some type 
issues and library support.

The point is that instead of bitching about how hard it is to implement 
the other language's solution in this language, to instead be thinking 
about the correct solution to implement in this language.

Brian