Subj : Re: OO compilers and efficiency
To   : comp.programming
From : Chris Dollin
Date : Tue Jul 26 2005 11:52 am

Scott Moore wrote:

> You all have been giving OCaml a lot of press here. Whats good about it? A
> look at Wakypedia shows that it needs lots of odd puncuation and "let",
> which I thought went out with Basic.

Hardly. `let` in OCaml, like `let` in ML (of which OCaml is a variant),
introduces a *declaration*, unlike Basic's LET, which introduces an
assignment. 

> Plus the example is clearly for an
> interpreter (it has a shell specifier at the top). 

That doesn't make it an interpreter (it might *be* one, it just doesn't
make it one). Nothing stops a program run using #! from compiling its
input; eg suitable uses of poplog Pop11 will run code from a script,
and *that* is compiled, on the fly, to native code. 

-- 
Chris "electric hedgehog" Dollin
predicting self-predictors' predictions is predictably unpredictable.

.