Xavier Leroy <xavier.leroy@inria.fr> writes:

>> Reading a recent thread on the list, I noticed that ocaml could be
>> used with COM components on windows. As I currently intensively use
>> the Python COM bindings with MS' text processor whose name I won't
>> say, I wonder if I could use ocaml to the same end.
>> However, the release notes in the ocaml-win distribution states that
>> the cygwin version lacks COM support, and the native win32 version
>> partially implements the libraries, among which I find no COM nor IDL
>> link. Does anyone on the list have more information ?

BTW, OcamlIDL can be easily patched to support COM under Cygwin, are you
interested in that?

[...]

> CamlIDL implements (most of) the "pure COM" approach, but is geared
> towards statically-typed, statically-known interfaces (on ne se refait
> pas, as we say in French), and is not suited to Automation.
>
> Microsoft applications use mostly (exclusively?) Automation to allow
> scripting.  The reason is that Microsoft pushes Visual Basic as the
> scripting language for their applications, although non-Microsoft
> dynamically-typed scripting languages such as Perl and Python have
> also been quite successful at that,

I think most of them use dual (custom/dispatch) interfaces, so
*theoretically* one can extract their IDL interface definition by OleView
tool and then create the necessary stubs by CamlIDL. But *practically* it
is not an easy task: many MIDL features are still not supported by CamlIDL,
so I gave up when I tried this recently...

Hope to hear from you soon,
Dmitry


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