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Frequently asked questions

Also see OCaml subtleties, the FAQ at ocaml.org, and Pierre Weis's Frequently asked Questions about Caml.

  • What is a "toplevel"?

    A/the "toplevel" is an OCaml term for a program that provides a prompt at which you can enter OCaml expressions and see what happens when they are evaluated. In some languages this is known as a "REPL", a Read-Eval-Print loop. (It Reads what you enter, Evaluates it, and then Prints the result.) Many people who use an OCaml toplevel use the utop toplevel. It's more full-featured than the ocaml toplevel that comes with an OCaml compiler. You can also evaluate OCaml expressions in an editor or IDE, for example. See the Code tools page.

  • Why are compound types such as float list and int option written with the "enclosing", polymorphic type last?

    There's no real reason, except that this is how it's always been done in OCaml. It might be a bad idea to change the syntax of types in a language that puts so much emphasis on types. (Standard ML uses the same convention. Since it and OCaml both developed from an earlier ML, it's likely that the convention predates OCaml.)

    However, the type syntax kind of makes sense if you think about English syntax: A "passenger ship" is a ship that carries passengers. An int list is a list that contains ints. (You could also write "list of integers" in English, but then you need to add the "of".)

  • Why do OCaml's constructors not work like Haskell's, i.e. they can't be curried?

    Originally, there was thought of doing them that way. The implementation was more complicated though, and OCaml's module system makes it hard to deal with them. See the full answer here.