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 XAA16181 for caml-red; Mon, 6 Nov 2000 23:10:04 +0100 (MET) 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 IAA29914 for ; Mon, 6 Nov 2000 08:05:44 +0100 (MET) Received: from sanson.reyes.somos.net (freyes.static.inch.com [216.223.199.224]) by concorde.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.10.0) with ESMTP id eA675g124414 for ; Mon, 6 Nov 2000 08:05:43 +0100 (MET) 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 BAA39969; Mon, 6 Nov 2000 01:58:55 -0500 (EST) (envelope-from fran@reyes.somos.net) Message-Id: <200011060658.BAA39969@sanson.reyes.somos.net> From: "Francisco Reyes" To: "caml-list@inria.fr" , "Chris Hecker" Date: Mon, 06 Nov 2000 01:55:59 -0500 Reply-To: "Francisco Reyes" Priority: Normal X-Mailer: PMMail 2000 Professional (2.10.2010) For Windows 98 (4.10.2222) In-Reply-To: <4.3.2.7.2.20001103055229.00ab6880@shell16.ba.best.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: Re: practical functional programming Sender: weis@pauillac.inria.fr On Fri, 03 Nov 2000 14:44:41 -0800, Chris Hecker wrote: >I'm open minded, so I'm genuinely interested to know if the work of making something like a simple >datastructure purely functional is more than an academic exercise, or if it pays back in real-sized >production software. I will be waiting to see what kind of responses you get but wanted to add my own feedback. I got looking at Ocaml because a program I use was written on it, Unison. I ordered a book, The Functional Approach to Programming, and although it does help somewhat it is too theoretical/math oriented. So are most of the docs and examples I have seen. I don't see many pratical-simple examples of Ocaml and so far the things I have thought of trying Ocaml took me too long to figure them out. Even with no pratical previous perl experience using a Perl book in less than a day I had got the basics and was on my way to been productive. I am not sure this could be possible with Ocaml. Is Ocaml best for larger more complex tasks? francisco Moderator of the Corporate BSD list http://www.egroups.com/group/BSD_Corporate