Re: ocamlc command line suggested features

From: Jacques Garrigue (garrigue@kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp)
Date: Tue May 30 2000 - 02:50:10 MET DST

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    From: "thierry BRAVIER" <thierry.bravier@dassault-aviation.fr>

    > I have been trying labltk since ocaml-2.99 first with: labltklink
    > and now with: ocamlc -I$STDLIB/labltk labltk.cma foo.ml
    >
    > * First, it made me think that an ocamlc -where option
    > (similar to that of camlp4) would be useful to get $STDLIB from ocamlc.
    >
    > This would make it possible to use:
    > ocamlc -I `ocamlc -where`/labltk foo.ml
    >
    > Remark 1: currently, I get $STDLIB from: (ocamlc -v | some scritpt) which is
    > a pain,

    Indeed a -where option would be useful, I also have lots of makefiles
    using the same script as you, in particular for the install procedure.

    But in this precise case, I would prefer the approach suggested by
    Sven Luther: to have an abbreviated notation for paths under the
    standard library directory.

    For instance we could have
            ocamlc -I +labltk

    Remark that now that we have the autolink mechanism, package path +
    library name is all you need to link in a library.
    (findlib is certainly more powerful, but it needs some form of
    meta-information, which is better handled outside of the compiler)

    > * Second, since the documentation for labltk is short I often find myself
    > using the toplevel just to check the type of say Tk.pack or
    > Scale.configure.

    I should have made more evident in the manual that you _must_ use
    ocamlbrowser (if labltk works, it works!). Then looking for function
    types is trivial. (Don't forget to configure your path to include
    the labltk directory.)

    > Wouldn't it be nice if we could just say:
    > ocamlc -sig labltk.cma

    .cma files do not contain typing information, you have to look inside
    .cmi files for that. And this is what ocamlbrowser does.

    Cheers,

            Jacques
    ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Jacques Garrigue Kyoto University garrigue at kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp
                    <A HREF=http://wwwfun.kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp/~garrigue/>JG</A>



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