]> As a programmer who did imperative and OO for 15+ years, and then switched to OCaml this year, I encourage you to stick with it. I think it will improve how you write in other languages, too (and Python has many functional features, btw). I agree that the syntax can be frightful, but it seems to be a requirement of functional languages. Some things that helped me: * Do lots of experimenting in the interactive top-level. If you're an Emacs user, get the Tuareg mode. The nice thing about working in Emacs is that you can evaluate an expression or two in your file, see what happens, make some changes to the expression, repeat. * I found the O'Reilly book very helpful. It doesn't assume familiarity with the functional way of doing things, like many other write-ups do. It's very application-oriented, which will make the examples familiar to you. And it has separate chapters for functional, imperative, and OO, so you get a feel for the different ways of writing OCaml code. You can download the book from http://caml.inria.fr/oreilly-book/. Good luck, tm ------------------- 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