On Thursday 14 August 2008 12:50:43 blue storm wrote: > It is also a good choice to begin with OCaml because everything you learn > with the OCaml basics can be reused for learning Haskell (the converse is > also true, but then you have to learn lazy evaluation first, wich is a > non-trivial shift, and is vastly less used in OCaml).
Monads and zippers? > The syntax are different, but not so much (before learning haskell, i could > generally understand the purpose of tiny haskell sources). I have heard > some people say they prefer the Haskell syntax, but this is more a matter > of taste (and not very relevant if you want to learn something from the > language semantics). Both have their ugly sides. That reminds me: you can run the same OCaml code in the top-level, in the bytecode interpreter and through the native code compiler. > Idiomatic OCaml implementations tend to produce more efficient than > Idiomatic Haskell implementations (but Haskell compilers are getting better > and better everyday (for Haskell performances to be good, compilers have to > do lots of clever and not so simple optimizations), Even if Haskell's performance is improved it will remain unpredictable and, consequently, it will continue to be impossible to optimize non-trivial Haskell programs. > and Haskell is faster than most (scripting) languages used these days > anyway). Despite being written in Python, Mercurial is orders of magnitude faster than Darcs. > The Haskell standard library is bigger than the Ocaml one, Does the Haskell stdlib provide a database interface, md5 checksums, marshalling, pretty printing, lexer generator, graphics library, regular expressions, unix interface and weak references? > Haskell program thus tends to > be more terse and "higher-level" (because of reusing a lot of higher-order > combinators in the stdlib): OCaml is also very expressive, but the > simplicity of the stdlib tends to keep people on simpler things. I'm not sure what you mean by "simplicity of the [OCaml] stdlib tends to keep people on simpler things" but there is certainly far more non-trivial software written in OCaml than Haskell, both open source and commercial. > Camlp4 is a flexible and powerful Ocaml preprocessor... And an extensible general-purpose parser generator that is higher-level than Parsec. Camlp4 rocks! -- Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd. http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?e _______________________________________________ Caml-list mailing list. Subscription management: http://yquem.inria.fr/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/caml-list Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs
