Re: ICFP programming contest: results

[Brian Rogoff <bpr@best.com>]

On Fri, 22 Sep 2000, Xavier Leroy wrote:
> > In your language summary, was OCaml included among the ML category?
> 
> Several members of this list were surprised that the language summary
> only mentioned "ML" and not OCaml nor SML nor other ML variants.
> 
> This is how it appeared on the judge's presentation, but I take it
> that in their minds (as well as in mine), "ML" stands for all ML
> dialects: OCaml, Caml Light, SML, Moscow ML, etc.  (Similarly, they had
> only one line for C and C++, although both languages are definitely
> different.)
> 
> Actually, I like the use of "ML" as an umbrella for all these
> dialects, since it helps reduce the fragmentation of the
> F.P. community as viewed by outsiders.

Since we've entered the realm of marketing now, let me also suggest that
there are good reasons to identify your product as unique, and emphasize 
the distinctions with other (inferior :) products. It really depends on
the outsider who's view you want to influence; it is certainly easy to
hire an ML programmer to work on ML code, but maybe not so easy to port 
a large body of ML code to an ML compilation system. 

-- Brian