Hello

Here is the latest Caml Weekly News, for the week of 08 to 15 November, 2005.

1. Get a page from the Web
2. Sexplib - library for S-expression conversions
3. The best way to circumvent the lack of Thread.kill ?
4. Finalization and object dependencies
5. IoXML by DDR no longer maintained?
6. Sudoku solver

Archive: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.caml.general/31116

And yet another way is to use perl4caml[1] and WWW::Mechanize[2] which
is wrapped by perl4caml.  This allows you to fairly easily navigate
websites (click links, push buttons, fill in forms and so on).

Rich.

[1] http://merjis.com/developers/perl4caml/
[2] http://search.cpan.org/dist/WWW-Mechanize/lib/WWW/Mechanize.pm
    

Archive: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.caml.general/31123

> we'd like to announce the availability of "Sexplib"

There is now a godi package: godi-sexplib
    

Archive: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.caml.general/31022

> First of all, what is going on in the Event module?  I can't exactly get
> it to work an I fear I'm missing some important concept.  I can't find
> any documentation other than the interface.  Does anybody know of any
> further documeeentation or have a good explanation of exactly what's
> going on.

Yes, the Event module is quite confusing.  I have used it in this code
(in the file adwords_mt.ml) to implement a simple command pipe between
a parent thread and worker threads, so you might want to download and
take a look at this code:

http://merjis.com/developers/adwords_api
http://merjis.com/_file/adwords-api-1.0.6.tar.gz
    

I found these two references useful to understand the Event library:

CML: A higher-order concurrent language 
John H. Reppy, In ACM SGPLAN '91 Conference on Programming Language Design and Implementation, pages 293-305. ACM Press, 1991.
http://portal.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=113470&type=pdf

Higher-order Concurrency 
John H. Reppy, Computer Science Technical Report 92-1285, Cornell University, June 1992. 
http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~jhr/papers/1992/phd-thesis.html

I think there is also a short example on how to use this module in OCaml Oreilly book.
    

Archive: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.caml.general/31196

> I've got to different types of objects, say database tables and
> cursors for one table.  Caml code is expected to access these objects
> using some handle reference.
>
> 
>   * If the GC detects that no handles for a particular cursor exist
>     anymore, the underlying cursor object should be closed (which may
>     free external resources such as locks).  At this time, all "equal"
>     handles become invalid, subsequent operations will fail.
> 
>   * If the GC detects that no handles for some table object exist, and
>     there are no handles for that table, this table is closed.
>     Subsequent operations on "equal" table handles will fail.
> 
>   * The user may explicitly close a cursor handle.  In this case, the
>     underlying object is closed, and the handle is marked invalid.
>     (Same as above.)
> 
>   * The user may explicitly close a table handle.  In this case, all
>     cursor which are still open are closed.  Future operations on
>     them, or the table, will fail.
>
>   * When the program exits, all cursors and tables shall be closed,
>     even if the program was termined by an exception.
>
> (Here, "to fail" means to raise an exception or some other kind of
> deterministic error signaling mechanism.)

This will be hard to do if you really want to be complete.  Some run- 
time
errors (most notably, "out of memory") are not exceptions, they stop the
program immediately.  Moreover, under Unix there are signals that cannot
be caught or ignored.

> Usually, application code will gracefully close all cursors, and the
> table, but I want my library to be as safe as possible to use, and
> avoid random crashes or memory leaks.
> 
> There are a couple of approaches to implement the desired behavior:
>
>   (1) Just use weak arrays of tables and cursor, together with  
> Gc.alarm.
>
>   (2) Use Gc.finalise for handler objects which contain an index into
>       (plain) arrays of tables and cursors.  Use reference counting
>       (or back pointers) to prevent premature finalization of table
>       objects while there are still cursors around.

A simple pointer from the cursor to the table should be enough.

>   (3) Same as (2), but using custom blocks and C code.

You'd need reference counts in this case.

I can't see how (1) would work.  (2) is normal if your objects are
implemented as OCaml data structures.  (3) if they are implemented by  
some
C library.

>   (4) Some hybrid approach.

> I'm not exactly happy with each appraoch because it seems I must
> implement a simple memory manager on my own for managing the array
> elements.  Perhaps I'm missing something?

Maybe simply that when you implement a program, you have to do some of
the work, the GC cannot do everything for you...

> How is the performance of the three approaches?  Each one uses a
> different GC mechanism to achieve its goals, so I'm a bit puzzled.

Different mechanisms for solving different problems.
    

Archive: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.caml.general/31241

> Is anyone still using the clever ioXML syntax extension by Daniel de Rauglaudre? 
>   Has anyone updated it to ocaml 3.08.4? 3.09.0?
> 
> I believe Maxence's Cameleon used to depend on it. Is it still so?

Hello Alex,

I had to update it in cameleon, since I encountered errors with "loc" ids.
I changed all "loc" variables in the code to "_loc" (file pa_ioXML.ml).

Later, I was told that the -loc option of camlp4 was made for this usage.
So a 'camlp4 -loc fooo' should work, but I did not test.
    

Archive: http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.caml.general/31252

Here is a little OCaml program to solve Sudoku puzzles:

  http://www.ffconsultancy.com/free/sudoku/
    

Using folding to read the cwn in vim 6+

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.

Old cwn

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Alan Schmitt