[Haskell-cafe] Ocaml for Haskellers tutorial

[Stephen Tetley]

Hi

Ocaml's a fine alternative to Haskell, you could be 'forced' to use
say PHP, now that wouldn't be quite so nice...

> For instance, I have heard that Ocaml is only fast when one uses loops
> instead of folds, but I wonder if this is an overstatement.

Maybe this notion is from the standard library not being optimized for
long lists?

http://ocaml.janestreet.com/?q=node/71
http://groups.google.com/group/fa.caml/msg/01e80aadf16837d6


There isn't much on performance in the O'Reilly book, but otherwise it
is pretty comprehensive:
http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/oreilly-book/

I suspect the difference between the ML module system vs. typeclasses
will be as important as lazy vs. strict. As a style point, Ocaml
programmers don't seem too prone to combinator mania - so I think golf
is a bit less popular over there.

One tip - sometimes you might see Ocaml code with the revised syntax
(particularly Gerard Huet's work, which whilst described as 'Pidgin
ML' is a subset of the Caml revised syntax) - this can be translated
automatically to regular syntax with camlp4. Not knowing this tripped
me up for a couple of days at the end of last year.

Best wishes

Stephen