Hello
Here is the latest Caml Weekly News, for the week of June 19 to 26, 2012.
Archive: https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list/2012-06/msg00147.html
Michał Kurcewicz announced:This is to announce OCaml bindings to the NLopt nonlinear optimization library. The wrapper code implements an almost complete NLopt API (the only exception are vector-valued constraints). I am using it in my projects without any problems, but it may still have some bugs. You can get the source from: https://bitbucket.org/mkur/nlopt-ocaml
Archive: https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list/2012-06/msg00137.html
Jeffrey Scofield asked:Can anybody tell me how to install OCaml on an Amazon EC2 instance? I'm running Amazon Linux (because it's free). None of the preconfigured repositories seem to include OCaml itself (though a few libraries are present if you enable EPEL 6 "Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux"). There's some indication that I need the "Optional Packages," but so far all I have is this name. I don't know what it refers to or how to access it from my instance.Stéphane Glondu suggested and Goswin von Brederlow added:
> You can try with Debian: > > http://www.monperrus.net/martin/installing-debian-on-amazon-ec2 You might also want to look into mirage (openmirage.org) for ocaml in a cloud. (But don't ask me how to start one on amazon.)Siraaj Khandkar suggested:
I would use Godi: http://godi.camlcity.org/godi/Jeffrey Scofield finally said:
Thanks very much for the suggestions for getting OCaml installed on Amazon EC2. I'm going to save them for future use. We just wanted to do some fairly quick testing, so I was looking for something simple. Since Amazon Linux is compatible with CentOS 6, what I ended up doing is installing the CentOS 6.2 OCaml package on my EC2 instance. I wrote up a description of how to do it here: http://psellos.com/2012/06/2012.06.ocaml-amazon-ec2.html We've run our first round of tests, and it all seems to be working. Maybe this will be useful to other OCamlers.
Archive: https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list/2012-06/msg00157.html
Jun Furuse announced:I have put a port of OCamlSpotter to OCaml 4.00.0 beta at https://bitbucket.org/camlspotter/ocamlspot . Try the default branch. OCamlSpotter is a source code definition/type query helper for Emacs (and possibly for other editors). See details at http://jun.furuse.info/hacks/ocamlspotter . Thanks to the new -bin-annot option of OCaml, OCamlSpotter no longer requires any compiler patch. It is now a small standalone application very easy to compile and install. It is a very quick port to OCaml 4 and the program is slower than the previous releases, but at least it passes all the existing tests. Probably you may be also interested in TypeRex for the same purpose.
Archive: https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/arc/caml-list/2012-06/msg00160.html
Aaron Bohannon asked:I have been trying to use the new camlp4 to write an OCaml syntax extension. All the examples I have seen so far suggest that I use the extension by passing ocamlc the "-pp" option. But it seems that all the location info for error messages gets lost when I do this unless I catch and report the parse error myself within the extension. Is there some way to get ocamlc to report the parse error at the correct location automatically?Gabriel Scherer replied:
All nodes in a Camlp4 AST are annotated with location information; the locations you get from the parser are correct, and it is your responsibility, as an extension writer, to ensure that any new nodes you generate also have (approximately) correct location information. If you build AST nodes "by hand", you have to provide this location explicitly. If you use the concrete syntax quotations, the location used is the value _loc present in the environment, whatever it may be. So to have correct locations, you have to make sure that, at every AST you produce through a quotation, there is a "_loc" variable in scope with the correct value. If you match AST pieces with quotation patterns (match e with <:expr< $a$ + $b$ >> -> ...), you may bind the location variable through the syntax "<:expr@foo<", for example: (match e with <:expr@_loc< $a$ + $b$ >> -> ...). Finally, if you're inside an EXTEND block defining a parsing rule, the idenfitier _loc is implicitely bound to a location corresponding to what was parsed by this rule. See for example the toy extension pa_refutable, that has example of those various things: http://bluestorm.info/camlp4/pa_refutable.ml.html In some very rare cases (or if you are perfectionist), you may want to give to a new node a location that is not quite the location of any of the parsed node you're working on. You may use various functions of the Loc submodule of your syntax definition to forge new locations; in particular, Loc.merge merges two (supposed contiguous) locations. http://bluestorm.info/camlp4/camlp4-doc/Sig.Loc.htmlAaron Bohannon then asked and Gabriel Scherer replied:
> Thanks for the reply. The example is helpful. However, I should have > been more clear: I don't exactly want to write a syntax extension, per > se. Rather, I am trying to use camlp4 to parse a non-OCaml grammar > and to generate an OCaml AST. So the "Register.OCamlSyntaxExtension" > functor doesn't seem like it will work for me. Instead, I tried using > "Printers.Ocaml.print_implem" in my "extension" code and everything > works fine, except for error locations. Of course, I realize this is > because the AST is being printed and then re-parsed, but I don't know > how to prevent it from being reparsed. I looked through all the > Camlp4 interfaces and thought that perhaps I need to use the function > "Register.register_str_item_parser". But I couldn't make that work. > Either that's not the function I need or else I don't know how to use > it -- I can't tell which. See the "full parser tutorial" in the Camlp4 wiki, it has information for what, if I have correctly understood, is your use case, including location handling. http://brion.inria.fr/gallium/index.php/Full_parser_tutorialAaron Bohannon then asked and Gabriel Scherer replied:
> Ah, yes. That is helpful. I had thought of trying to "extend" OCaml > by replacing the grammar with a different one, although I didn't know > exactly how to do it. > > Of course, it seemed obvious to me that I wouldn't be able to use my > own lexer if I did that. I'm not sure if I will want to do that or > not yet, but I was thinking I would just learn to do it that way so > I'd have that flexibility if I need it. Unfortunately, the page stops > short of explaining how to pursue that approach. :( If you want to implement your own lexer, you have to provide the MakeGram functor your own module satisfying the Lexer signature. http://bluestorm.info/camlp4/camlp4-doc/Sig.Lexer.html If you can reuse Camlp4's predefined lexer, however, you should not hesitate to do that. There is little use in being original on the lexing part, and users that already know OCaml will appreciate the consistency in the lexical conventions. Camlp4's token type for OCaml is rich enough to integrate comments and whitespace information, so you can even define an indentation-dependent language on top of the pre-existing lexer, using a filtering function on the token stream : http://bluestorm.info/camlp4/camlp4-doc/Sig.Token.Filter.html
Thanks to Alp Mestan, we now include in the Caml Weekly News the links to the recent posts from the ocamlcore planet blog at http://planet.ocamlcore.org/. A formally-verified alias analysis: http://gallium.inria.fr/~scherer/gagallium/a-formally-verified-alias-analysis/index.html 2D Interpolation, Part 1: The Digital Differential Analyzer: http://alaska-kamtchatka.blogspot.com/2012/06/2d-interpolation-part-1-digital.html LRTT parser: https://forge.ocamlcore.org/projects/lrttparser/ File Sharing on the Spot: http://alaska-kamtchatka.blogspot.com/2012/01/file-sharing-on-spot.html Announcing Opa 1.0: http://blog.opalang.org/2012/06/announcing-opa-10.html Stog 0.1: http://caml.inria.fr/cgi-bin/hump.cgi?contrib=818 Xtmpl 0.1: http://caml.inria.fr/cgi-bin/hump.cgi?contrib=817
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