Anil Edakkunni wrote:
Building ocaml-3.09.3 from source did the trick. links-0.4 built just
fine after that.
This may be another newbie question (Having searchable mail archives
would be a big help), but why was Links developed in O'caml? Why not
Haskell?
I looked for an answer in the Links paper, but didn't find one.
Anil--
Glad you got it working on the Mac. I run a Mac but haven't tried
compiling Links recently so I wasn't quite ready to help after your
first message. If you have more trouble, email again and perhaps I or
someone else could help.
As to your question: Links grew from an implementation developed by an
M.Sc. student, Gilles Dubochet, who graduated shortly thereafter. He
chose OCaml for the implementation language and didn't say specifically why.
In retrospect, though each of us has often griped about various aspects
of OCaml [1], I think it is a very practical language in the family of
functional programming languages. There are fairly good libraries for
many practical needs, and it generally allows a lot more flexibility
than Haskell would. To wit, in OCaml, we never have to rewrite a
function because some function far downstream of it in the call graph
suddenly has an incidental side-effect, which Haskell would force us to do.
Hope that helps--
Ezra
[1] "OCaml Gripes" blog post, Ezra Cooper.
http://ezrakilty.net/research/2005/11/ocaml_gripes_1.html
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