[e-lang] OCaml and Emily in a Walnut, first draft

[Marc Stiegler]

In preparation for the upcoming HP Tech Report on Emily, I have drafted 
a document about OCaml and Emily specifically designed to help C++ and 
Java programmers make the transition. This document is unlike anything 
else about OCaml that now exists. It is designed to step an imperative 
programmer through the process of writing significant OCaml programs.

Those of you in this community who have functional programming 
backgrounds, beware. This tutorial will leave you foaming at the mouth, 
beating your hands against the wall. Choose a room with soft surfaces if 
you decide to read this. As an example of how serious I am, here is an 
example: the section on Lists and list processing is not only the 
shortest section, it is also the last section, an afterthought, almost 
an appendix. Readers of this document will be writing whole systems 
before they learn what a list is.

Find OCaml and Emily in a Walnut at

http://www.skyhunter.com/marcs/emilyWalnut.html

It is "unpublished" in the sense that it is not yet listed on my home 
page. I will "publish" it when I have the Emily development environment 
also posted (as a zip file), which is still going to take some work.

I will be particularly interested in hearing criticisms from folks with 
non-functional programming backgrounds. Is this document helpful or not? 
It may not be. OCaml really is very different. But this doc at least 
tries to be helpful, whereas, in my experience, most OCaml documents 
couldn't care less about the difficulties faced by a person from a C 
background.

The good news is, this document is much shorter than E in a Walnut, and 
can remain so. There are other documents about OCaml out there, so I do 
lean on them as reference material. E in a Walnut has a harder problem, 
one not well suited, frankly to a book self-described as a Walnut :-)

--marcs