About Caml and OCaml

The official Caml website is here: http://caml.inria.fr/
Download the PDF Manual. Also, the book Developing Applications with Objective Caml (O’Reilly, translated).
Check out the online learning resources: http://www.ocaml-tutorial.org/ | http://wiki.cocan.org/training

Caml is a general–purpose programming language. It’s pretty much safe. (It checks up on a lot of things for you that keep your code safe). It’s also open–source and free. “Caml is issued from the ML programming language, designed by Robin Milner in 1978.” Caml is compiled, but also features an interactive mode to interpret “phrases” as they are typed. Check out mod_caml for Apache — use OCaml for CGI! Also, Ocsigen is an interesting project using OCaml for web programming.

Portability makes OCaml very attractive. “OCaml makes it quite simple to write portable programs which will work across Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and Unix from a single codebase.” — http://wiki.cocan.org/features/portability

Documenting and Releasing Your Work

Caml2Html lets you create HTML files of your source: http://martin.jambon.free.fr/caml2html.html, and this guy really seems to know what he’s doing with the language too. These guys have a cool system: release open–source software, and have a commercial outlet for those who don’t want to mess with it.

Application

The file extension(s) appear to be .ml, .mll, .mly, .cma (.cmo for cgi scripts using mod_caml), and the first thing I notice glancing at Caml source is the existance of two line terminators ( ;; ) at the end of most lines. The Caml Hump contains a project to bridge Objective–C and Objective Caml. There is also a project to bind ming to Caml for Flash creation.

History

The language was developed around 1980-1984+ (the first implementation appeared in 1987), and has seen wide usage worldwide. “The Caml language is widely used for teaching programming.” It was originally developed in Lisp. The name was originally a pun on CAM, the Categorical Abstract Machine, and ML, the family of programming languages to which Caml belongs. The site says the language is no longer associated with CAM. Objective Caml appeared in 1996. Microsoft has even copied it with their F# language! Caml is decidedly French. ;]

For a cross–section of Caml activity in North America, see:

• Companies using Caml in North America
• People using Caml in North America

There is a project to create an IDE for Caml and other languages: http://home.gna.org/cameleon/

“Cameleon aims to become an integrated development environment for Objective–Caml, and eventually other languages.”

For OSX, there is CocOCaml: http://www.cs.unm.edu/~wneumann/cococaml/

“CocOCaml is a Cocoa based wrapper for the OCaml toplevel environment.”

Also, just found this one: http://www.iapp-z.com/camlx/