categorical abstract machine language
(foldoc) | Categorical Abstract Machine Language
(Originally "CAML" - Categorical Abstract Machine
Language) A version of ML by G. Huet, G. Cousineau, Ascander
Suarez, Pierre Weis, Michel Mauny and others of INRIA and
ENS. CAML is intermediate between LCF ML and SML [in
what sense?]. It has first-class functions, {static type
inference} with polymorphic types, user-defined {variant
types} and product types, and pattern matching. It is
built on a proprietary run-time system.
The CAML V3.1 implementation added lazy and mutable data
structures, a "grammar" mechanism for interfacing with the
Yacc parser generator, pretty-printing tools,
high-performance arbitrary-precision arithmetic, and a
complete library. CAML V3 is often nicknamed "heavy CAML",
because of its heavy memory and CPU requirements compared to
Caml Light.
in 1990 Xavier Leroy and Damien Doligez designed a new
implementation called Caml Light, freeing the previous
implementation from too many experimental high-level features,
and more importantly, from the old Le_Lisp back-end.
Following the addition of a native-code compiler and a
powerful module system in 1995 and of the object and
class layer in 1996, the project's name was changed to
Objective Caml.
["The CAML Reference Manual", P. Weis et al, TR INRIA-ENS,
1989].
(2003-04-12)
|