Re: [Caml-list] (Mostly) Functional Design?

From: Paul Snively <psnively@mac.com>
To: james woodyatt <jhw@wetware.com>
Cc: Ocaml Trade <caml-list@inria.fr>
Subject: Re: [Caml-list] (Mostly) Functional Design?
Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2005 10:13:48 -0700	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <69AEC165-A85D-4292-8B6A-32756AF1FD9C@mac.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <d76a4f3c5636834ed1a1975107c6c038@wetware.com>

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Hi James!

On Jul 19, 2005, at 9:53 AM, james woodyatt wrote:

> They're kinda hard to use in Ocaml, which my preferred functional  
> language, so I don't think it would be a good idea for me to try to  
> write such a thing.  It would be nice if somebody did.
>
I dunno; from what I can see of the available O'Caml libraries,  
you've done quite a lot more work with monadic programming in O'Caml  
than anyone else. If you couldn't write a newbie introduction to the  
subject, I despair of anyone else doing it.

Since O'Caml is also my preferred functional language, I find it  
frustrating to see grab-and-use implementations of things like  
monadic foo or the Zipper structure or Functional Reactive  
Programming... in Haskell, and not be able to find them for O'Caml.  
When some of the constructs are awkward, for heaven's sake, go ahead  
and use camlp4 to make some nice syntactic sugar, cf. the Haskell- 
like "do" notation that was released not too long ago. When there's  
more than one credible implementation of a subconcept that a module  
depends on, please implement the module as a functor. Obviously, this  
is basic stuff, and since I haven't yet released any O'Caml code of  
my own, I desperately need to take my own advice. :-)

I guess I should mention that I am in the process of attempting to  
build an F-Rep-based geometric modeling kernel in O'Caml, with  
eventual visualization integration with lablGL. I think O'Caml is  
incredibly well-suited to this task, but as I'm still very much in  
the process of mastering O'Caml at the same time I'm trying to  
understand F-Rep systems, collaboration would be welcome. Ultimately  
the goal is to develop a 3D modeling system competitive and  
collaborative with the UnrealEd etc. tools included with the Unreal  
technology based games, but there are many subprojects that have to  
happen first, and a good F-Rep kernel seems like an excellent  
starting point.

>
> -- 
> j h woodyatt <jhw@wetware.com>
> markets are only free to the people who own them.
>
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Best regards,
Paul Snively

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