On Sat, 2004-08-28 at 04:49, John Goerzen wrote:
> On Friday 27 August 2004 01:37 pm, skaller wrote:
> > The way to get a library of important utilities
> > for Ocaml is to (a) make interfaces to C and (b) write the code
> > in Ocaml.
> 
> Why is C so much better?  It's actually pretty darn difficult to 
> interface to C from a higher-level language.

Two reasons. One: C is the portable interface
to almost all operating systems -- there are
ISO Standards governing compliance (both for C and Posix)
and interface specs from people like Microsoft.

Two: there are a lot of libraries written
in C with C interfaces, which are either
compliant with some standard or open source.

In particular most programming languages, 
such as Python, have C level APIs.

So binding to C does really have a particular importance.
Ocaml already has reasonable facilities to do it
(including documentation)

> And (b) is sometimes just NOT an option, either because of time 
> constraints or because you don't know what the original code does to 
> start with.

I agree. But an off-the-shelf guarranteed interface to
Java isn't currently available either. Where should you
put your energy?

> That's way too easy: JDBC.  (Not because OcamlDBI sucks but because so 
> many databases have JDBC available.)

Surely enhancing OcamlDBI is a viable option?

-- 
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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