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:
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.