]> John Max Skaller wrote: > Lack of bindings to C libraries is also an obstacle, but I'd roll that > up into issue (2). I hope I can offer some insight into this. I am a student at the University of Iowa in the U.S. I will say that I think that O'Caml is very interesting and I enjoy learning it. But, everything seems to be Java or VB over here, both at school and in the job market. So, that means I will seemingly forever be using O'Caml only in my free time. Also, Java has the focus of so many open-source developers and open-source users. If I write my software in O'Caml, I worry that nobody will be interested in it because it isn't Java. And, contributions to other projects won't be accepted because they are not Java. And, it is an odd feeling to write code that seemingly nobody will ever use. Finally, there is the user interface issue. I haven't seen any TCL/TK applications that have "good" user interfaces running on Windows or Mac OS. I want my applications to look like Windows applications on Windows and Mac applications on Mac. And, I don't want to learn a Windows GUI API and a Macintosh GUI API. TCL/TK does not provide this. But, Java _does_ do this, in a "mostly good enough" way that is always improving. So, I think that, if people are interested in seeing O'Caml have more widespread use, at least in the short term there needs to be better interoperability between Java and O'Caml. In particular, it should be easy for me to write a user interface in Java and write my "business logic" in O'Caml. In general, it should not require a lot of work to reuse an existing Java library (there are so many). Currently, these things are not easy. Xavier's JNI bindings seem like they might help, but there needs to be something "above" those bindings. And, there needs to be some example application that makes use of these bindings. If these things are provided then O'Caml won't seem so much like its own far-off world to Java programmers. Here is an example of what I would like to do with O'Caml: I would like to take a software model (described using UML or some other modeling languages) and transform that model into various other languages. For example, convert a UML package of classes into an O'Caml module of classes. Or, perhaps take a set of Java interfaces and make a set of O'Caml bindings for those interfaces. And, I want to integrate this tool with the NetBeans IDE which is written in Java. Regarding syntax: It seems perhaps the O'Caml syntax is designed to be easy for the O'Caml parser to parse, instead of being easy for me to figure out. But, it would be nice if at least the object-oriented syntax could reduce the amount of punctuation needed, and also be a little more consistent within itself and the rest of the language. Also, it would be nice to have better support for recursive types/classes/exceptions so that introducing spurious type variables isn't needed. I would rather reserve type variables for use only when I want polymorphism. Just my US$.02 (worth a whole US$.02 but look at our prescription drug prices!) - Brian ------------------- To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/ Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners