Hello
Here is the latest Caml Weekly News, for the week of 25 November to 02 December, 2003.
A very interesting interview of Robin Milner can be found here:
http://nick.dcs.qmul.ac.uk/~martinb/interviews/milner/
Here is an excerpt directly related to Ocaml:
Q: If you look at something like Ocaml, which I think is currently the
most advanced dialect of ML, it is the first such language that is
pragmatically viable. You can use it do do most things other than
low-level programming. Are you surprised at what it looks like, what's
in it, what's omitted? Is it how you expected it to be? For example
you have modules and objects, although these two concepts overlap
significantly.
R: I think that's a wonderful story of how a language can evolve and
still remain very robust. But carrying rigorous semantics through that
evolution would be very difficult and that is something we will have
to solve for future languages. I think Caml is a terrific success
because it shows that a language which began as a theoretical
undertaking can nevertheless achieve what any engineering language can
also achieve.
> I'm trying to write a simple parser (below) but I've problems parsing
> tag-like keywords. Probably this is a problem related with the lexer.
> does anybody know a solution that doesn't imply heavy modifications to
> the (Genlex) lexer ?
Genlex module parses just the ocaml syntactic categories, tags you're
trying to parse are not one of them.
You can try ulex or the former, I've never looked at the details but I'm
pretty sure it can do what you want since they are used to parse XML
documents. (See http://www.cduce.org/download.html or the debian
package "ocaml-ulex").
This is just a message to announce a new domain in the Caml/OCaml Humps,
"Languages analyzers", dedicated to tools and libraries useful to
analyze other languages, like B, C, ...
And by the way, we're always glad to add references to the Humps, so
do not hesitate to indicate us new libraries, tools, ..., for your
favorite language, or developed with it. Write to hump@caml.inria.fr .
Here is a quick trick to help you read this CWN if you are viewing it using vim (version 6 or greater).
:set foldmethod=expr
:set foldexpr=getline(v:lnum)=~'^=\\{78}$'?'<1':1
zM
If you know of a better way, please let me know.
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