Re: [Caml-list] Metaprogramming features

[David Teller <David.Teller@univ-orleans.fr>]

On Sat, 2008-10-04 at 03:00 +0100, Jon Harrop wrote:
> 1. Obvious applications are low-level compilers for regular expressions, 
> parsers and bytecodes but MetaOCaml imposes the limitations of OCaml (e.g. 
> slow char and int handling) which makes it unsuitable for most such 
> applications.

Oh, well, you answer some of your own question from your other post. I
was thinking along the lines of ulex. And I have the impression you can
get a nice "finally" with MetaOCaml, albeit perhaps with a weird
syntax. 

Now, another obvious application is writing efficient trampoline code
and other combinators, something which I believe may be very useful for
concurrency.

> 3. You cannot generate new pattern matches to leverage OCaml's optimizing 
> pattern match compiler in your run-time generated code (but you can use 
> static ones).

You can't? Well, that's unfortunate. We'll have to keep relying on
camlp4 for the moment.

Cheers,
 David
-- 
David Teller-Rajchenbach
 Security of Distributed Systems
  http://www.univ-orleans.fr/lifo/Members/David.Teller
 Angry researcher: French Universities need reforms, but the LRU act brings liquidations.