> What type of a value is 2002-12-20T16:00 and how does it get  
> translated into a date?

This kind of value does not exist in ocaml. From <http:// 
www.lexifi.com/resources.html> :

> MLFi is implemented as an extension of Caml

So they must use some kind of pre-processor, most likely camlp4 [1].

Best,

Daniel

[1] The official documentation is here <http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/ 
manual-camlp4/index.html>, but more
recent news can be found there <http://caml.inria.fr/pub/ml-archives/ 
caml-list/2006/05/fbc206cc8ec3a8d73f523e18a90759e3.fr.html>.