>>>Another *famous* example is 'readline()', the code that
>>>does line editing for bash. Why is Ocaml's top level
>>>so crappy, with no editing? Because of readline()'s GPL
>>
>>Surely that's not a good reason anymore; there are non-GPL
>>workalikes to readline().
>
>
> Well one might ask Inria why they don't use it?

(Just an aside: please say "the Caml development team" rather than
"Inria", these are two different things.)

So, yes, readline being GPL is a serious obstacle to using it within
the OCaml toplevel.  More details in this old thread:

http://groups.google.com/group/fa.caml/browse_thread/thread/e7266ab6e6df91e7/e5ce04a21c80cac0

This said, rlwrap works pretty well and I don't see many advantages to
linking directly with readline.

- Xavier Leroy