Author: Gareth McCaughan
Date: 18:04:14 12/11/01
Go up one level in this thread
On December 11, 2001 at 17:44:03, Roy Eassa wrote:
[I said:]
>> SML = Standard ML. I would recommend OCaml in preference, though,
>> since the OCaml compiler produces staggeringly fast code.
>
> I somehow hadn't heard of Caml before. I looked up O'Caml at
> http://www.ocaml.org/ and found it to be very interesting. How would you
> compare it to Python (or Jython)?
I'm not an expert, but here are a few differences.
- Quirkier syntax. One advantage of Python is that it's very
readable even for newcomers; O'Caml doesn't have that.
- Much faster execution. O'Caml's compiler produces blindingly
fast native code. Python doesn't have a native code compiler,
and its bytecode compiler + interpreter doesn't produce specially
good performance.
- Static typing. O'Caml is a statically typed language, but
not so obtrusively as (e.g.) C++ because it has type inference
and polymorphic types.
- Functional versus eclectic/procedural. Python is a fairly
mainstream language in most respects; it makes a couple of
small nods in the direction of functional programming (e.g.,
having a "lambda" keyword) and a couple in odder directions
(e.g., its generators), but basically it's very ordinary.
O'Caml is a functional language, and it does pattern matching,
and in general it feels much less mainstream than Python.
The heavy use of nested functions and higher-order functions
is likely to make it seem rather inside-out, for instance.
- Libraries. Python comes with a bunch of handy modules for
doing the sort of things the Python developers care about:
strings, regular expressions, serving and reading web pages,
XML and so on. O'Caml's developers have a rather different
focus. Yes to strings and regular expressions; no to web and
XML And all that trendy stuff. On the other hand, yes to
arbitrary-precision rational arithmetic and parser building
and sets.
Someone who knows more about O'Caml than I do can probably say
more.
--
g
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