6 Feb 2002 (updated 22 Jan 2003 at 12:44 UTC)
»
OCaml and scsh
chalst
suggests scsh as an
alternative to OCaml. My
main interest in OCaml is as a language that I can write can
code in as quickly as in a scripting language and compile to
get high performance if necessary. (My
real interest is in modelling protein structures which needs
every drop of performance I can get). That said, I like the
design philosophy behind scsh and the
idea of embedding domain-specific little languages.
The only
real reasons I prefer OCaml over Scheme is that it's
statically typed and it has a reputation for being very fast.
I'm not sure these are good reasons. Scheme
programmers seem to manage just fine without static typing
and Brad Lucier
showed that, using Gambit-C,
you could get performance equivalent to C from Scheme
code for number-crunching PDEs.
I think I'm a Scheme programmer at heart but for
mercenary
reasons I've learning to live with C++ and trying to ignore
my suspicion that using Scheme would help me to "beat the
averages".