Re: [Caml-list] Scripting in ocaml

[Serge Aleynikov <serge@hq.idt.net>]

skaller wrote:
> On Thu, 2006-12-21 at 15:34 +1100, Erik de Castro Lopo wrote:
>> 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.
>> Makes a lot of sense. I used to do scripting style tasks in Python
>> but nowadays I prefer to use Ocaml.
> 
> As one of the authors of several major pieces of Python,
> my comment is that whilst it provides great convenience
> and good code structure .. dynamic typing just doesn't
> scale.

Could you please illustrate your point by more concrete reasoning. 
Erlang uses dynamic typing (or rather strict typing) and scales very well.

> The big problem using Ocaml (bytecode) for scripting
> is probably the ugly dynamic loading support, and 
> for long running systems, the lack of unloading support.
> (plus the syntax which isn't really well suited to small
> scale scripting applications).

Why is dynamic loading ugly?  In Erlang dynamic loading allows to do 
hot-swappable code-reloading which is a very neat feature for 
long-running systems.

> As an alternative you might consider Neko and/or NekoML.
> 

Regards,

Serge