Description OCaml is a general purpose programming language with an emphasis on expressiveness and safety. Developed for more than 20 years at Inria by a group of leading researchers, it has an advanced type system that helps catch your mistakes without getting in your way. It's used in environments where a single mistake can cost millions and speed matters, is supported by an active community, and has a rich set of libraries and development tools. It's widely used in teaching for its power and simplicity.
Strengths:
* A powerful type system, equipped with parametric polymorphism and type inference. For instance, the type of a collection can be parameterized by the type of its elements. This allows defining some operations over a collection independently of the type of its elements: sorting an array is one example. Furthermore, type inference allows defining such operations without having to explicitly provide the type of their parameters and result.
* User-definable algebraic data types and pattern-matching. New algebraic data types can be defined as combinations of records and sums. Functions that operate over such data structures can then be defined by pattern matching, a generalized form of the well-known switch statement, which offers a clean and elegant way of simultaneously examining and naming data.
* Automatic memory management, thanks to a fast, unobtrusive, incremental garbage collector.
* Separate compilation of standalone applications. Portable bytecode compilers allow creating stand-alone applications out of Caml Light or OCaml programs. A foreign function interface allows OCaml code to interoperate with C code when necessary. Interactive use of OCaml is also supported via a “read-evaluate-print” loop.
In addition, OCaml features:
* A sophisticated module system, which allows organizing modules hierarchically and parameterizing a module over a number of other modules.
* An expressive object-oriented layer, featuring multiple inheritance, parametric and virtual classes.
* Efficient native code compilers. In addition to its bytecode compiler, OCaml offers a compiler that produces efficient machine code for many architectures.
Learn more at: https://ocaml.org/learn/description.html
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