Le Thu, Feb 03, 2005 at 07:34:15PM +0100, Frédéric Gava écrivait/wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> > Anyway, this leaves us with a very interesting question: how many people
> > actually do believe in the value of Ocaml? I, for myself, use it whenever
> > it is the most appropriate tool for a job (usually, when portability is
> > an issue). This is sometimes the case, but more often than not, LISP
> > turned out to be a better choice for what I do.

> What kinds of programs code with LISP could not be implemented (easely)
> using Ocaml ?

The main feature of Lisp that Ocaml does not have is the
meta-programming ability. This not only includes the powerful macro
system of Common Lisp (but Ocaml has Camlp4) but above all the ability
to genreate code at runtime.

The MetaOcaml extension of Ocaml (see http://metaocaml.org/ for
details) has a typeful meta-programming ability (which should be
stronger than that of Common Lisp, mostly because its type system
guarantee types of generated programs): howevefr the current
implementation does not garbage-collect the generated programs, which
make using it awkward.

I hope I am grossly right  - I may be wrong in the details, not being
a MetaOcaml expert.

Regards.

-- 
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