]> William Lovas writes: > It strikes me that although you were able to quite easily translate this > toy evaluator example into C++, this may not have been the case with a > larger, more complex example. Even this toy example was not really translated into C++. Translating OCaml functions, which can be closures, to C style function pointers, is a cheat. To be accurate, you need to model these as C++ functors (yes, I hate that terminology but that's what Stroustrup uses) to simulate closures. This is inevitably a pain, because simulating nested functions in a lexically scoped language means that the object constructor has to have the variables that the "execute" function uses explicitly passed in. > It's something that scales exponentially, so you're probably not going to > find very many small, concise examples that show conclusively how much > easier O'Caml is. Actually, I think that there are quite a few. Anyways, if you're interested in pursuing the extensibility question raised here further, Jacques Garrigue wrote a nice little paper comparing sum types, polymorphic variants, and classes on a simple evaluator example. http://wwwfun.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~garrigue/papers/fose2000.html -- 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