Re: convincing management to switch to Ocaml

[Brian Rogoff <bpr@best.com>]

On Sat, 28 Aug 1999, John Skaller wrote:
> At 12:00 27/08/99 +0200, Andreas Rossberg wrote:
> >You are right that there are more than just technical reasons for
> >choosing a particular technology. And many (not all) of these arguments
> >have their justification. However, I don't agree that in the particular
> >case of OCaml vs. C++ there exist any _technical_ advantages in the
> >language C++ itself.
> 
> 	I am not sure due to inexperience with Ocaml, but I would
> guess (since I know C++ backwards) that the main issue would
> be performance, and a secondary issue the ocaml compilation
> system (with the requirement on a strict ordering which is
> getting in my way at present).

Consider that C is roughly a subset of C++. Since OCaml is technically
superior in every way to C, the OCaml implementors are then not very smart 
since certain libraries (bignums, regexps, ...) are coded in C, not pure 
OCaml, even though they could easily be written in pure OCaml. Since we
know the OCaml implementors are very smart, we have reduced the
hypothesis of unqualified OCaml superiority to an absurdity :-).

Use the right tool for the job. I probably wouldn't write hardware
simulation models in OCaml. I probably wouldn't write the program to 
do clock tree insertion or scan insertion (essentially build a parse tree 
of structural Verilog and then abuse it) in anything else. Well, maybe 
SML or Icon would not be horrible...

-- Brian