Hello,

Here is the latest Caml Weekly News, week 04 to 11 March, 2003.

1) Libraries in functional languages
2) ipv6
3) Announce: Xcaml 0.0.1 released

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1) Libraries in functional languages
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Benjamin Pierce said and Diego Olivier Fernandez Pons answered:

> Although I share the impulse behind the recent discussions about
> improving the standard library, I wonder if it is actually missing
> the main point: there are *already* lots of improvements on the
> standard library out there -- the Unison project has one; probably
> there are at least a dozen better ones out there -- but nobody can
> find them!  This leads to an idea for a different way of soaking up
> people's hacking energies...

I have written two pages with all avaible software I know on various
functional languages. Sources are shorly commented, explaining their
principal features and links are given.

- (balanced) binary search trees
- automata and regular expressions

http://www.edite-de-paris.com.fr/~fernandz/Caml/index_en.html

Hope this helps.

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2) ipv6
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Yaron Minsky asked, Shawn Wagner answered, and Olivier Andrieu announced:

> > Any ideas if/when ipv6 support will make it into the Unix module?  I
> > know that there is a patch for the compiler that provides this
> > functionality, but for obvious reasons it would be more convenient to
> > have it in the standard distribution.
> 
> I did a lot of work on this a while back, but got bogged down with
> other things. I think all that's left in what I was working on is
> adding getaddrinfo and getnameinfo support. I might blow the dust
> off in it in a bit, but it'll be a while, as I'm very busy with  
> other things, and when it comes to ocaml stuff, another ocaml-mysql
> release has priority. That should, free time permitting, happen
> next week. Then I can hopefully dig out the ipv6 stuff.

I did some things on ipv6 too. I made a patch for the Unix library :

http://oandrieu.nerim.net/ocaml/index.html#ipv6

There's getaddrinfo and getnameinfo support and some other things too.

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3) Announce: Xcaml 0.0.1 released
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Alessandro Baretta announced:

Hello Caml riders!

I'm glad to announce the first public alpha release of the
Xcaml application server for Apache (and other CGI enable
web servers). You can find it at:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/xcaml/

Xcaml is a number of things:

1) An XML flavored programming language.

Xcaml scripts compute a text file, generally an XML or HTML
file. The full power of Ocaml can be unleashed by embedding
ocaml code within <?xcaml ... ?> processing instructions. 
Other features include $-variables, whereby "$varname" gets
substituted with the contents of the "varname" CGI
environment variable); $-expressions, whereby "$( ocaml-expr
)$" is substituted with the string computed by the
ocaml-expr; $#-variables, whereby "$#varname" is substituted
with the contents of the varname session-environment
variable saved within the xcaml application server.

2) An Xcaml -> Ocaml -> Bytecode compiler

Xcaml scripts get translated to Ocaml and subsequently
compiled to bytecode object files.

3) A dynamic application server

Xcaml-derived bytecode object files are dynamically linked
with the xcaml executable to produce the output of the
associated xcaml-script.

Xcaml is currently being used to develop web frontends to
mission critical database applications.

Currently, the main limitation of the Xcaml system is the
total absence of documentation, as the the implementors of
the Xcaml system are also the only users (up to now).

I plan on working on the documentation, but I would first
like to estimate how much interest there is in the ocaml
community for this project.

Of course, contributions and cooperation are more than welcome.

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Old cwn
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Alan Schmitt