From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from weis@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id IAA21044 for caml-red; Mon, 16 Oct 2000 08:24:01 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from concorde.inria.fr (concorde.inria.fr [192.93.2.39]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id CAA19318 for ; Mon, 16 Oct 2000 02:54:01 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from sanson.reyes.somos.net (freyes.static.inch.com [216.223.199.224]) by concorde.inria.fr (8.10.0/8.10.0) with ESMTP id e9G0rx501904 for ; Mon, 16 Oct 2000 02:53:59 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from tomasa (tomasa.reyes.somos.net [10.0.0.11]) by sanson.reyes.somos.net (8.9.3/8.9.3) with SMTP id UAA57403 for ; Sun, 15 Oct 2000 20:46:16 -0400 (EDT) (envelope-from fran@reyes.somos.net) Message-Id: <200010160046.UAA57403@sanson.reyes.somos.net> From: "Francisco Reyes" To: "caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr" Date: Sun, 15 Oct 2000 20:52:25 -0400 Reply-To: "Francisco Reyes" Priority: Normal X-Mailer: PMMail 2000 Professional (2.10.2010) For Windows 98 (4.10.2222) In-Reply-To: <25507.971539172@silvercomet.emperorlinux.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: Seeking pratical tutorial or examples. Sender: weis@pauillac.inria.fr I have looked at the caml site, the hump and all I links I could find from the main site. So far the manuals/tutorials I have seen did not "quick start" my development intentions. I am looking for a pratical tutorial or some simple beginner examples. After days of reading the manuals I am yet to be able to write even a simple program. Even when I skip sections on the manuals they still don't offer anything beyond Syntax. Isn't there a code snippet/samples page? What I have tried so far are the intro on the Ocaml Manual, the "Functional Programming using Caml light" and "One hundred lines of Caml". Comments on the 3 sources I mentioned above: ** Ocaml Manual: The intro is not bad, except that for those of us coming from languages without a built in interactive system we may not be as interested to start with that. Why? because although great for learning it is of not much use unless we just want to try simple things. It also falls short of giving enough info to get one started. I think the following order may be more benefitial to someone coming from languages such as C/pascal. -Start by having something which shows a compiled program and a few basic statements (i.e. ask for name and then print hello . -Cover data types and show the functions to read them and display them. No fancy explanation about "channels" just give examples using print functions and whatever is used to read info into a variable. -Loops and branching: "for" and "if" -Cover functions -Basic file I/O -String handling -More advanced data structures/types: arrays, user defined data types, lists. -The interactive system And of course on all those steps start showing the user the way things are written in Ocaml and how things are called in it. ** Functional Programming using Caml Light I am up to chapter 5 and I am yet to dream of how to actually write a complete program. Even after I jumped chapters ahead to chapter 9, Basic I/O, there are one line descriptions or trivial use of the fucntions, but I didn't even see a simple brief program to show all elements together. The document almost seems like reference material, except that it is too descriptive/narrative to be that. ** One Hundred lines of Ocaml: This is enough to give a "taste" of the language, but far from been enough to start hacking. Have a missed a kinder/gentler tutorial somewhere? Somewhere on the caml site I saw a mention about a series of examples that come with the compiler. The FreeBSD port I got didn't have them and I was unable to find them on the web site (caml.inria.fr) francisco Moderator of the Corporate BSD list http://www.egroups.com/group/BSD_Corporate