Re: [Caml-list] Re: Syntax extensions without Camlp4

[Paolo Donadeo <p.donadeo@gmail.com>]

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On Sun, May 27, 2012 at 8:04 PM, Daniel Bünzli <daniel.buenzli@erratique.ch>
wrote:

> camlp4 is one of the (conceptually) ugliest component of the OCaml system.
> Pre-processors in general are a wrong solution to a real problem;
> meta-programming facilities should be part of the core language and
> play by its scoping rules, they should not be layered on top of it.


I subscribe. At the present state OCaml, which is otherwise an almost
perfect language, needs some tool, I mean any tool, to accomplish
*simple*metaprogramming tasks.

Camlp4, which could be an awful or an amazing tool, is known by an inner
circle of wizards, and the activity of creating a new syntax extension is
a... sorcery for initiates only.

My experience of average and maybe dumb OCaml programmer: last week I tried
to write a simple ORM, something resembling the Django
ORM<https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.4/topics/db/models/>and, after
some (random) trial and error, I simply gave up. I have started
thinking to use cpp as a preprocessor to create very simple "templates",
which is awful, but the only alternative I have is to define the ORM
classes in something like XML, parse them and generate OCaml sources.

It's definitively a lose-lose game.


-- 
*Paolo*

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