Perhaps controversially I've written a prototype, pre-alpha interface
for calling Perl code from OCaml. You can download it here:

http://www.annexia.org/tmp/perl4caml-0.1.tar.gz

The long term aim here is to be able to utilise the huge resource that
is CPAN (http://www.cpan.org/) from within OCaml. It wouldn't be
completely automatic because of course you would still need to write
interface specifications (similar in concept to .mli files) to make
things type-safe.

A wrapped Perl library would never be as fast or efficient as a native
OCaml implementation, but at least the option would be there.

Rich.

Here is an example:

----- test.pl

sub return1
  {
    print "this is the 'return1' function!\n";
    1;
  }

sub adder
  {
    $_[0] + $_[1]
  }

----- test.ml

open Printf

let () =
  (* Arguments passed to the Perl "command line". Loads [test.pl] *)
  let args = [| ""; "-wT"; "test.pl" |] in

  (* Create the Perl interpreter. *)
  let pl = Perl.create ~args () in

  (* Call some subroutines in [test.pl]. *)
  let sv = Perl.call_scalar "return1" [] in
  printf "return1 = %d\n" (Perl.int_of_sv sv);

(*
  let sv = Perl.call_scalar "adder" [`Int 3; `Int 4] in
  printf "adder (3, 4) = %d\n" (Perl.int_of_sv sv);
*)

(*
  (* Evaluate a simple expression. *)
  Perl.eval "$a = 3";
  printf "$a contains %d\n" (Perl.int_of_sv (Perl.get_sv "a"));
*)

  (* Destroy the interpreter. *)
  Perl.destroy pl

-----

-- 
Richard Jones. http://www.annexia.org/ http://freshmeat.net/users/rwmj
Merjis Ltd. http://www.merjis.com/ - all your business data are belong to you.
MAKE+ is a sane replacement for GNU autoconf/automake. One script compiles,
RPMs, pkgs etc. Linux, BSD, Solaris. http://www.annexia.org/freeware/makeplus/

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