Objective Caml (thing)

The most modern representative of the Caml dialect of ML, a statically typed strict impure functional programming language. It features several advances over its ancestor, Caml Light; the most significant of these is an object-oriented extension to the type system, which allows for a different style of modular programming (than the module system provides on its own).

OCaml is one of the most popular functional programming environments available for Unix-like systems today, in large part because of its focus on pragmatics:

• comprehensive source libraries for lots of system-level interaction like file handling, Unix processes, and pipes
• user-contributed libraries for arbitrary precision integer arithmetic and other common tasks
• easy integration of C/C++ libraries into OCaml programs via a simple linking procedure
• a portable bytecode compiler and interpreter
• an extremely competitive native code compiler for some platforms
• an interactive toplevel interpreter for quick prototyping and testing of code

Also, Objective Caml teams have consistently come up on top at the ICFP programming contest. This year (2000), OCaml teams took both first and second prizes for excellent performance and correctness in their raytracers which had to accept a specific language. See the Caml homepage (http://caml.inria.fr) for more details.