On Mon, Nov 22, 2010 at 05:55:02AM -0800, Dario Teixeira wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> > I am on the fence about whether to learn OCaml or not, and while
> > reading an article called "Why OCaml"
> > (http://www.cs.ubc.ca/~murphyk/Software/Ocaml/why_ocaml.html),
> > I saw that OCaml was praised for the speed of the executables it
> > generates - and was referred to, speed-wise, as "second to none",
> > except C and C++.
> 
> Yes, Ocaml is fast (more on that later), but you should consider speed
> as just the icing in the cake.
[...]

But if it were not performant enough, I (and many others too, I think)
would consider it being a nice toy language.

AFAIK in the past, functional langauges were not adapted, because they were
very unperformant - at least this is one reason.
Another reason might be, that the available functional languages in the past
were overloaded with parenthess ;)

Ciao,
   Oliver