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Hello

Here is the latest Caml Weekly News, for the week of May 08 to 15, 2007.

  1. offre d'emploi p2p/ocaml a l'INRIA
  2. labltk for tk 8.4 BETA release
  3. Felix 1.1.3 released
  4. camlp4 and streams
  5. ODT: a *new* OCaml IDE integrated into Eclipse
  6. Polymorphic variant difference...

offre d'emploi p2p/ocaml a l'INRIA

Archive: http://groups.google.com/group/fa.caml/browse_frm/thread/1d19af765f2e0e7d/980d4954b3c61487#980d4954b3c61487

Fabrice Le Fessant announced:
  Le projet ASAP cherche a recruter un jeune ingenieur pour un contrat 
d'un an a l'INRIA-Futurs Saclay (Parc Club Universite, Orsay, RER Le 
Guichet depuis Paris) pour travailler sur le prototype d'un logiciel 
pair-a-pair en ocaml, Peerple (http://www.peerple.net/). C'est assez 
urgent, les candidatures doivent maintenant se faire par email a mon 
attention (fabrice.le_fess...@inria.fr), avant le 18 mai 2007 (fin de 
semaine prochaine), le site web etant probablement clos pour le depot 
de candidatures. 

  La fiche detaillee de l'offre: 

http://www.inria.fr/futurs/emploi-et-formation/ingenieurs-jeunes-diplomes

puis: 

"Peerple, logiciel pair-à-pair d'hébergement de données"
			

labltk for tk 8.4 BETA release

Archive: http://groups.google.com/group/fa.caml/browse_frm/thread/4c644037991c6fab/7f13820d2ae933dd#7f13820d2ae933dd

Jeffrey Loren Shaw announced:
I've updated labltk to use some new widgets and commands that are available 
in Tk 8.4. 

DIRECTIONS: 
get the ocaml 3.10 beta release 
extract the ocaml beta archive 
replace otherlibs/labltk with the one from the following link 
http://www.msu.edu/~shawjef3/labltk-8.4-BETA1.zip 

configure, make world, make install 

This is a BETA release, meaning that I believe I've implemented all the new 
features, but I haven't tested them much. 

Here are my additions to the changelog: 

2007-05-11 (*BETA release from shawj...@msu.edu*) 
 ---------- 
*labltk now requires Tk 8.4 
*added spinbox widget 
*added TkConsole module 
*added labelframe widget 
*added panedwindow widget 
*added functions tk_textCopy, tk_textCut, tk_text_Paste to the text widget 
*Removed CamlTk 
*Removed tkanim (depended on Camltk) 
*Removed Frx (Depended on Camltk) 
*Removed examples_camltk (Depended on Camltk) 

Please note that this is an unofficial release. I'm not affiliated with the 
ocaml development team.
			
David Teller then said:
That's a very good initiative. 
In my mind, a few other things are missing in LablTk. 

* Ease of installation. 

 At the moment, beginners who wish to use LablTk under Windows (or who 
are pressed to do this by, say, their teacher) must first find and 
install the correct version by inferring the location of the installer 
from an erroneous link hidden in the fine print of the documentation of 
LablTk [1]. 

 As Tk is so important, i'm not sure why Tk is not bundled with OCaml's 
Windows version. I suggest either bundling it or at least providing an 
(up-to-date) link from OCaml's official download page [2]. 

* Documentation 

 At the moment, LablTk has virtually no documentation. The page in the 
manual is barely an overview and suggests reading the documentation of 
Tcl/Tl. Which is all fine and good, except that it doesn't help with 
types, I can't for the life of me remember how I found out that type 
~~  color ~~ is actually a polymorphic variant ~~ `Color of string ~~ 
and beginners who learn OCaml as their first or second programming 
language will never manage that much. 

 I suggest including a LablTk tutorial, perhaps inspired of [3] and 
actually ocamldocumenting the .mli . 

* Other libraries 

 Ok, I might be asking a lot, but I personally consider that Graphics is 
half-useless without CamlImages. I also consider that LablGl is a good 
way to demonstrate the power of OCaml to students and perhaps to bring 
them to something like game programming in OCaml. It requires CamlImages 
for textures. The list could continue with LablGtk and plenty of others 
but these two would be my personal priority. 

 Consequently, in my mind, both should be easy to install at the same 
time as OCaml, which is not the case at the moment. Again, under Linux, 
that's not much of a problem. Under Windows (and perhaps Mac OS X), it 
is very much so. 

 I don't suggest providing a package manager under Windows and I do know 
about GODI but I also know that students will never be bothered to 
install GODI. What I do suggest is just either adding inside OCaml's 
Windows installer the option to add "extension libraries", with a short 
description of what each extension does, or providing links to binary 
installers from OCaml's download page. 

What do you think ? 

Cheers, 
 David 

[1] http://caml.inria.fr/pub/docs/manual-ocaml/manual042.html 
[2] http://caml.inria.fr/ocaml/release.en.html 
[3] http://www.cs.uiuc.edu/class/sp07/cs421/resources/labltk/
			
Jeffrey Loren Shaw answered:
* ease of installation 

http://downloads.activestate.com/ActiveTcl/Windows/8.3.5/ 

or for the beta labltk... 

http://downloads.activestate.com/ActiveTcl/Windows/8.4.14/ 

Yup that link should be updated. I don't think it should be bundled with 
ocaml, however. The end-user might already have it installed, or might not 
need it. But this is a decision for the ocaml devs. 

* Documentation 

You're right, it's not very good. I used the ocamlbrowser extensively to 
learn how to use labltk. It took me a lot of experimenting, and I'm still 
terrible at getting widgets laid out the way I want. 

I'm not sure how to do the documentation in an automated way without 
changing the grammar for widgets.src to allow ocamldoc comments. That's 
beyond my abilities, but I suppose it's a worthy project for someone. On the 
other hand, widgets.src is already very cluttered. 

* Other libraries 

I don't know anything about these, but again these are questions for the 
ocaml devs. 

Anyway, my focus right now is getting this beta version of labltk working 
correctly... there's a lot of functions to test. 

Now here's an idea... 

Instead of documenting labltk, which is difficult for the beginner ocaml 
programmer anyway, make a wrapper to make it more ocaml-y. I'm not sure if 
this would be easy or possible, but coercing labltk into one style of 
programming (preferably functional) could go a long way towards making it 
easier to learn for the beginner. Also the wrapper would potentially be 
easier to document. As I recall, the most difficult aspects of labltk are 
those that are imperative, eg: 

event functions are unit -> unit, (maybe this can't be avoided) 
pack is difficult to deal with, 
the need to use optionmenu and Textvariable.handle together is not obvious 

Another huge but useful project would be a type-safe parser for the outputs 
given by the Widget.configure_get functions. 

Now back to testing.
			
Later on, Jeffrey Loren Shaw announced:
http://www.msu.edu/~shawjef3/labltk-8.4-BETA2.zip 

There's nothing to add to the changelog; this simply contains bug fixes. The 
bugs were things I added incorrectly to widgets.src. 

I deleted labltk-8.4-BETA1.zip so it is no longer available.
			

Felix 1.1.3 released

Archive: http://groups.google.com/group/fa.caml/browse_frm/thread/375b00ab380569c2/b1830ccda8a9a076#b1830ccda8a9a076

John Skaller annouced:
Felix 1.1.3 has been released and can be obtained from 
        http://felix.sourceforge.net/flx_1.1.3_rc4_src.tgz 

(it's release candidate 4, but that's final in the 1.1.3). 
It should build on all Unix systems, OSX, Cygwin, Win32, 
and Win64 (using VS2005=VC7 or VS2007=VC8 compilers). 
You will need Python, Ocaml, and either g++ or MSVC++ installed. 
Please join mailing list for help building on Windows platforms. 

Felix is an advanced language in the Algol/ML family, 
with technology and ideas stolen from Ocaml and Haskell. 
It generates ISO C++ code, and provides facilities for 
easy binding to C and C++ using a NFI (Native interface) 
generally not requiring any external glue logic. 
It also features high performance user space cooperative 
threading. 

Licence: FFAU (roughly BSD). 

Roughly it is designed for C++ programmers who can't afford 
to throw out legacy C/C++ libraries or frameworks, 
Ocaml/ML/Haskell programmers with the same problem, 
applications requiring very high performance, 
or researchers who want to implement production variants 
of research ideas in a open code base. 

This release was a long time coming because it adds a major 
new feature -- Haskell style typeclasses. This facility 
is equivalent to C++ template specialisation, but done right. 
Second order support is 'just enough' to provide a Monad 
typeclass. 

In addition, this release supports first order axioms, reductions, 
and lemmas. Reductions are user defined term rewriting rules. 
Lemmas are propositions which can be proven from axioms. 
These assertions can be written in typeclasses to provide 
formal specification of some semantics. 

Apart from automated checking of axioms by use cases, Felix now 
emits Why code representing the axioms, and makes any 
lemmas goals. The generated files can be submitted to 
a theorem prover via Jean-Christophe Filliâtre Why program 

        http://why.lri.fr/ 

or directly to Ergo. This system is of course work in 
progress, but it does verify at least one simple lemma :)
			

camlp4 and streams

Archive: http://groups.google.com/group/fa.caml/browse_frm/thread/a1a46639c13c92b7/0f89c6358069a60d#0f89c6358069a60d

Isaac Freeman asked and Nicolas Pouillard answered:
> I am having some problems using streams in my camlp4 extentions. The code: 

> EXTEND 
>   expr: LEVEL "expr1" 
>     [[ "yield"; e1 = expr LEVEL "simple"; 
>        "continue"; e2 = expr LEVEL "simple" -> 
>           <:expr< [< $e1$; $e2$ >] >> ]]; 
> END;; 

> produces the error: 

> isaac@lappy:~/stuff/ocaml$ ocamlc -pp "camlp4o pa_extend.cmo 
> q_MLast.cmo" -I +camlp4 -c gen-syntax.ml 
> File "gen-syntax.ml", line 8, characters 18-20: 
> While expanding quotation "expr": 
> Parse error: illegal begin of expression 
> Uncaught exception: Pcaml.Qerror("expr", 1, _) 
> Preprocessor error 

> However, when I change the stream into a list, it works fine, so I'm 
> sure there is just some technicality in using streams here that I'm 
> not accounting for properly. Any ideas? 


You are hitting a limitation of the old camlp4 implementation. The 
thing is that the quotation expander <:expr<...>> provided by 
q_MLast.cmo is somewhat limited to the revised syntax. 
BTW in revised streams syntax is: [: ... :] (instead of [< ... >]) and 
elements starts with a backquote instead of a single quote. 

Indeed the stream syntax is provided as a syntactic sugar over regular 
OCaml code using the Stream module from the standard library. 

However the new Camlp4 implementation provided in 3.10 lift that 
shortcoming by giving a full reflection system. So if you want to use 
the original syntax everywhere you can use camlp4of that provided 
quotation (<:expr<...>>, patt, ctyp...) in the original syntax 
including syntactic sugars. 

Here is a 3.10 valid extension: 

$ cat ext.ml 
open Camlp4.PreCast;; 
open Syntax;; 
EXTEND Gram 
  expr: LEVEL "top" 
    [[ "yield"; e1 = expr LEVEL "simple"; 
       "continue"; e2 = expr LEVEL "simple" -> 
          <:expr< [< $e1$; $e2$ >] >> ]]; 
END;; 

$ ocamlc -c -I +camlp4 -pp camlp4of ext.ml 
$ camlp4o ./ext.cmo -str 'yield e1 continue e2' 
Stream.lapp (fun _ -> e1) (Stream.slazy (fun _ -> e2))
			

ODT: a *new* OCaml IDE integrated into Eclipse

Archive: http://groups.google.com/group/fa.caml/browse_frm/thread/f27402d82fe0ced8/a387499f680377f0#a387499f680377f0

Emmanuel Dieul announced:
Here is the first version of the ODT (OCaml Development Tools) project. 
It aims to be like the JDT plugins, which is the most famous IDE for 
Java applications development into Eclipse... but ODT is not yet so 
advanced ;-) 

Everything is available on the ODT website: http://ocamldt.free.fr. 
The "overview" page explains its current main features, and the 
"install notes" page details some requirements and incompatibilities. 
Some screenshots are also available to show the GUI. 

Please, don't hesitate to try ODT (for personal or professional use) 
and forward this mail to anyone which could be interested in.
			
Dmitry Bely asked and Emmanuel Dieul answered:
> How does it differ from ocamlfp 
> (http://eclipsefp.sourceforge.net/ocaml/)? Its Haskell part seems to 
> be actively developed, although the Ocaml one is untouched for more 
> than a year. 
> 
> - Dmitry Bely 

I shortly used this plugin and I was a little bit desapointed. Some points 
were quite difficult for me: 
- I didn't have a human readable outline, 
- the syntax highlighting was not implemented very well (.mll and .mly files 
  not supported), 
- there was no automatic compilation (am I wrong ?), 
- ... 

I also noticed that the last release on sourceforge was 3 years old. I started 
to look at the source code and tried to adapt it, but it asked too much work 
than rewriting it from scratch. That's why ODT was born.
			
Dmitry Bely then asked and Soutaro Matsumoto answered:
> Are you planning any 
> support for refactoring  (renaming at least)? 

I am working for refactoring editor(it is funded by Google Summer of 
Code 2007). I am working on my own plugin (it is not ODT). 
We need parser, code formatter, and program transformater for 
refactoring any way. I will make them so portable that ODT(or some other 
programs) can use.
			

Polymorphic variant difference...

Archive: http://groups.google.com/group/fa.caml/browse_frm/thread/2277159276eede23/c92bc0294e7ccf73#c92bc0294e7ccf73

Till Varoquaux asked, David Allsopp added, and Jacques Garrigue answered:
> > Given a polymorphic variant type t with a label `B how does one build 
> > the type corresponding to t without the label `B. 
>
> So that you could write something like: 

> type t = [ `A | `B | `C ] 

> let f x = 
>   match x with 
>     `B                     -> (* x has type t *) 
>   | #(t minus [ `B ]) as x -> (* x has type [ `A | `C ] *) 

> I end up having to write lots of tedious extra types to achieve that 
> normally... I'd find a subtraction syntax very handy too. 


There is no theoretical difficulty in adding this (when t is defined), 
but this would mean yet more syntax... 
I would be curious to see code where this becomes such a pain. 
In my view, having to name this type should help clarity. 

> On a similar subject, am I the only person who finds I often need to take a 
> fixed polymorphic variant value and coerce it so that it can just accept 
> more constructors e.g. (seriously contrived example)... 
> type t = [ `A | `B | `C ] 

> let f (x : t) = 
>   match x with 
>     `A -> `D 
>   | _  -> (x : t :> [> t ]) 

> Something more concise than (x : t :> [> t ]) would be nice: e.g. (x ::> t) 
> But perhaps that really is a job for camlp4! 


Indeed, this one is just about syntactic sugar, so camlp4 can do it. 
An alternative without new syntax would be to let 
  (x :> [> t]) mean (x : [< t] :> [> t]), 
but this would break the invariant that coercions always work when the 
coerced value is already an instance of the target type (not that 
anybody uses this invariant...)
			

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}$'?'&lt;1':1
zM

If you know of a better way, please let me know.


Old cwn

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Alan Schmitt