From: Christian Szegedy <szegedy@...>
Date: 2002-09-29T22:31:44+09:00
Subject: OT: Ocaml  (was: R)

Friedrich Dominicus wrote:
>\
> No it is not, and it's even easy to find examples where it's faster
> than C. 
> 

OK, show me an example, I would be interested.

>>3) The OO support is quite artificial and (at least aesthetically)
>>    does not fit into the core language.
> 
> Why?

1) First of all : there exist practically no object
    oriented built libraries for the language.
    If you use the functional ones, so if you develop
    object oriented stuff you must switch between the
    two paradigms, what I don't like.

2) The definition of properties (attributes) more
    cumbersome than in Ruby or Delphi)

3) Too many method/mutable keywords in the
    class definition. This is too verbose for me.
    I hate using the # symbol as a delimiter.
    Clearly these are the most unimportant ones,
    and a matter of taste.

4) All methods are virtual (in the C++ sense:
    i.e. dispatched dynamically. This seems to be
    unimportant, but I use ocaml to write fast code
    (if I don't need speed, I use Ruby). In fact
    I experienced 8x slowdown while using the
    objective features (after several
    different reimplementation and optimization
    of the same stuff.)

    (In fact the classes were rather small, but this
     clearly indicated the serious overhead
     associated with using classes.)

5) Side effects are the very nature of OO languages,
    but they don't really fit into the functional
    philosophy.

This made me use the old traditional system, which is
really great but of course much more error prone
to write every time:

Hashtbl.add t x
t.add x

I think Ocaml has a lot of room for improvement:
it is quite nice as a functional language but clearly
suboptimal as an object oriented one.

I think overloadable methods would be much more
important for ocaml, than some OO-looking stuff
attached on it. It would simply solve all my problems:
I would be completely content if I could write
"add t x" instead of "Hashtbl.add t x" or "t#add x".

Regards, Christian