Re: OCaml on iPhone

[Jeffrey Scofield <dynasticon@mac.com>]

Robert Muller <muller@cs.bc.edu> writes:

> This sounds great.  I will be teaching an iphone programming
> course next year and I would very much like to use the course
> as an opportunity to introduce students to caml.  I know that
> there are others gearing up for iphone programming courses who
> aren't thrilled with the idea of teaching Objective C.

Right now we're mostly focused on getting iPhone applications
completed and accepted by Apple.  We've built the interface layer
by hand, a little bit at a time as required.   So there are
wrappers only for the parts of Cocoa Touch we use, and there are
a few rough edges.  It wouldn't make a good teaching environment
in its current form.

The cross-compiler does work though, and it builds working
applications.  I'll be sending the rest of our patches shortly.
Creating wrappers for all of Cocoa Touch would be a very big job
but it might be possible to implement a small subset for
students.

> If you were to post your resources on a web site it might lower
> the barrier to entry for more people to use ocaml + your
> wrappers rather than Objective C.

Right now the best we can do is probably to offer advice on some
things that did and didn't work for us.  As we make progress
perhaps we'll be in a position to do more.

Regards,

Jeff Scofield
Seattle