[Haskell-cafe] Haskell vs OCaml

[Donn Cave]

Quoth Tomasz Zielonka <tomasz.zielonka at gmail.com>:
...
| There are many differences (Haskell on the left):

Might also mention foreign (C) function interface (FFI.)  ocaml's is
I would say average, but ghc's is outstanding, really a different
level of support altogether.

With regard to the syntax - aside from esthetic questions or awkward
notations, there are some practical problems with Objective CAML's
common syntax, having to do with optional block delimiters and ";"
as a statement concatenator.  Sometimes you need to add what seems
like gratuitous delimiters to compensate for the kind of unintuitive
interpretation.  There's a revised syntax that eliminates this problem
among other things, but little apparent interest from the community
(which figures - they wouldn't be using Objective CAML if this was
a high priority for them.)

ocaml is nice work, though - very portable compiler that produces
native code, and that has helped promote FP in general even if the
language isn't all that rigorously functional (mutable strings!?)
It seems like it might do very well if it were adopted by basically
a new community that would insist on the revised syntax and would
make serious use of the OO side of the language, which is kind of
interesting.

	Donn Cave, donn at drizzle.com