Preface
The desire to write a book on Objective CAML sprang from
the authors' pedagogical experience in teaching programming concepts
through the Objective CAML language. The students in various majors and
the engineers in continuing education at Pierre and Marie Curie University
have, through their dynamism and their critiques, caused our presentation
of the Objective CAML language to evolve greatly. Several examples in this book
are directly inspired by their projects.
The implementation of the Caml language has been ongoing for
fifteen years. Its development comes from the Formel and then Cristal
projects at INRIA, in collaboration with Denis Diderot University
and the École Normale Supérieure. The continuous efforts of the
researchers on these teams, as much to develop the theoretical
underpinnings as the implementation itself, have produced over the span of
years a language of very high quality. They have been able to keep pace
with the constant evolution of the field while integrating new programming
paradigms into a formal framework. We hope through this exposition to
contribute to the widespread diffusion which this work deserves.
The form and the foundation of this book wouldn't be what they are without
the help of numerous colleagues. They were not put off by rereading our
first manuscripts. Their remarks and their comments have allowed this
exposition to improve throughout the course of its development. We wish
particularly to thank María-Virginia Aponte, Sylvain Baro, Christian
Codognet, Hélène Cottier, Guy Cousineau, Pierre Crégut, Titou Durand,
Christophe Gonzales, Michelle Morcrette, Christian Queinnec, Attila Raksany
and Didier Rémy.
The HTML version of this book would not have seen the light of day without
the tools
hevea and
VideoC. A big thank you to their
respective authors, Luc Maranget and Christian Queinnec, who have always
responded in the briefest intervals to our questions and our demands for
changes.