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On Thu, Sep 29, 2005 at 07:59:01PM +1000, Erik de Castro Lopo wrote:
> For just about everything you can do with a pointer in C there is
> a better, easier, less error prone way to do the same thing in
> O'caml and write less lines of code to do it.
How about writing a network protocol stack. You get a packet and all
you know about it is that here is a block of memory. You then have
to figure out what sort of packet it is, how long it is and what
structure to give it. C handles this very nicely with pointers to
structures that can be cast into whatever you need.
> The one exception
> I can thing of is writing devices drivers and operating systems
> where you need to direct access to harware.
If you are talking about I/O ports, you can always write a pair
of functions to write and read from I/O and these can be added to
any language (possibly even as inlines if the language supports that).
There is no native I/O port access in C.
Consider how useful functions like memcpy() and memcmp() are for
writing an O/S. Consider also that an O/S is actually a form of self
modifying code which strict type checking is designed to prevent.
I isn't about direct hardware access, it is about having the flexibility
to do what needs to be done. Try the simple exercise of writing an
O'caml program that reads in a chunk of binary code from a file,
and then executes that code to get a result. Less lines of code than C?
- Tel
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