Re: [Caml-list] Scripting in ocaml

[Richard Jones <rich@annexia.org>]

On Wed, Dec 20, 2006 at 10:41:20PM -0500, Denis Bueno wrote:
> I've been writing bash scripts to perform various build- and
> development-related tasks, and I don't enjoy it. I won't bore you with
> detailed reasons why. The upshot is that I'd like to script in OCaml.
> 
> I have considered writing a few camlp4 extensions to make it easier to
> write scripts:
> 
>  1) create a syntax which grabs environment variables:
> 
>    e.g. $FOO would grab the value of the environment variable FOO
> 
>  2) some sort of more convenient process interaction, e.g., for piping.

I think it's a great idea - I'd love to push OCaml for scripting.
However I hope your camlp4-fu is up to snuff.  You'd want, as you say,
a syntax for pipelines and file redirection, but more importantly
you'd want a very simple syntax for running commands.  So you can
write some unholy OCaml/sh combination like:

  let nr_files = int_of_string ` ls | wc -l `

Actually, even Perl isn't a very usable alternative for shell
scripting because of the amount of code you have to write just to fork
off a command and capture the output.

Rich.

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