ocaml

I want to advertise OCaml to beginners, and I am looking for good tutorials in English; not that you have only heard of, but that you have actually tried and found useful... I quite like the book Developing Applications With Objective Caml -- I guess the title should be updated to mirror the 'OCaml' naming decision. It is old and therefore slightly out-of-date, but on only minor aspects -- eg., it presents the stream syntax as belonging to the core language, but it is now outsourced as a Camlp4 extension. The book is surprisingly complete, and there is a lot of meat already in the chapters 2,

I'm currently working on a small project with OCaml; a simple mathematical expression simplifier. I'm supposed to find certain patterns inside an expression, and simplify them so the number of parenthesis inside the expression decreases. So far I've been able to implement most rules except two, for which I've decided to create a recursive, pattern-matching "filter" function. The two rules I need to implement are: -Turn all expressions of the form a - (b + c) or similar into a - b - c -Turn all expressions of the form a / (b * c) or similar into a / b / c ...which I suspect would be fairly

I have been trying to explain the difference between switch statements and pattern matching(F#) to a couple of people but I haven't really been able to explain it well..most of the time they just look at me and say "so why don't you just use if..then..else". How would you explain it to them? EDIT! Thanks everyone for the great answers, I really wish I could mark multiple right answers. Having formerly been one of "those people", I don't know that there's a succinct way to sum up why pattern-matching is such tasty goodness. It's experiential. Back when I had just glanced at pattern-matching and

I am wondering if I should continue to learn OCaml or switch to F# or Haskell. Here are the criteria I am most interested in: Longevity Which language will last longer? I don't want to learn something that might be abandoned in a couple years by users and developers. Will Inria, Microsoft, University of Glasgow continue to support their respective compilers for the long run? Practicality Articles like this make me afraid to use Haskell. A hash table is the best structure for fast retrieval. Haskell proponents in there suggest using Data.Map which is a binary tree. I don't like being tied to a

I wrote a OCaml program for union find algorithm. This algorithm I wrote is not optimal and is the simplest version. I put my OCaml code here because I am not sure whether this code is good enough or not (despite of the algorithm itself) , although this code can run without errors. This is the first time I wrote a complete working thing after I started to learn OCaml, so please help me by reviewing it. Useful suggestions will help me improving my OCaml skills. Thanks type union_find = {id_ary : int array; sz_ary : int array};; let create_union n = {id_ary = Array.init n (fun i -> i); sz_ary =