On Sat, 2004-08-28 at 06:56, John Goerzen wrote:

> > Two reasons. One: C is the portable interface
> > to almost all operating systems -- there are
> 
> This means that you could write an OCaml interface to syscalls.  
> Granted, that's an advantage, but one I rarely need.

Like when you read from a in_channel in Ocaml?

You don't need to access the system. But the
Ocaml team did, to give you that feature .. :)

> > Two: there are a lot of libraries written
> > in C with C interfaces, which are either
> > compliant with some standard or open source.
> 
> That's true.  At the same time, binding to C is just about the most 
> difficult language I could imagine to bind to.  

Yeah? Just try interfacing two diffent memory management
systems -- eg Ocaml and JVM garbage collectors :)
[At least C doesn't really *have* any memory management system :]

> I'm not disputing that at all.  Obviously this is true.  I'm just 
> suggesting that other approaches have utility, too, because they're 
> superior in some situations.

And I'm not disputing that -- in general. I'm just questioning
the utility of accessing inferior technology just
to interface inferior libraries.

My suggestion was the maximum utility would actually come
from this when needing to access *custom* codes -- that
is one off applications not worth rewriting, or, proprietary
codes you cannot rewrite.

> > Surely enhancing OcamlDBI is a viable option?
> 
> I have to talk to several databases who provide drivers only for Windows 
> ODBC and Java JDBC.  There is no hope of OCamlDBI supporting them, 
> ever.

Hmm .. but Windows ODBC is just another C API for databases isn't it?
So OcamlDBI can talk to it -- Ocaml does run on Windows :)

-- 
John Skaller, mailto:skaller@users.sf.net
voice: 061-2-9660-0850, 
snail: PO BOX 401 Glebe NSW 2037 Australia
Checkout the Felix programming language http://felix.sf.net



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