From:	 David Mentre <David.Mentre@inria.fr>
To:	 lwn@lwn.net
Subject: Attn: Development Editor, Latest Caml Weekly News
Date:	 16 Oct 2001 15:44:54 +0200

Hello,

Here is the latest Caml Weekly News, weeks from 3 to 16 october, 2001.

Summary:
1) Producing shared objects on i386 ELF systems
2) Some O'Caml hints
3) prerelease of OCamldoc: a documentation tool for O'Caml
4) OCamlCVS: an ocaml front-end to CVS
5) Test release Objective Caml 3.03 Alpha
6) No Caml Weekly News next week

======================================================================
1) Producing shared objects on i386 ELF systems
----------------------------------------------------------------------

"malc" announced:

At http://algol.prosalg.no/~malc/scaml you will find a patch against
OCaml 3.02 and some information suitable for producing shared objects
on i386 ELF systems.

======================================================================
2) Some O'Caml hints
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Markus Mottl announced:

to make life easier for OCaml-newbies, I have started writing a small page
with hints on common topics like compiling and editing OCaml-projects or
how to use OCaml for scripting. I hope to extend it with more detailed
information over time, but for the beginning it may suffice to give
people a productive start and incentive for experimentation:

  http://www.ai.univie.ac.at/~markus/home/ocaml_hints.html

======================================================================
3) prerelease of OCamldoc: a documentation tool for O'Caml
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Maxence Guesdon announced:

I'm pleased to announce a pre-release of OCamldoc, which i hope will
become the "javadoc for OCaml".
http://www.maxence-g.net/tools.html

======================================================================
4) OCamlCVS: an ocaml front-end to CVS
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Maxence Guesdon announced:

I'm still pleased to announce a first release of OCamlCVS, a graphical
front end to CVS commands. It uses LablGtk for the graphical part. It
also includes a library which can be used in applications using files
under CVS.
http://www.maxence-g.net/tools.html

======================================================================
5) Test release Objective Caml 3.03 Alpha
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Xavier Leroy announced:

An alpha release of what should eventually be Objective Caml 3.03 is
available for testing at the usual place:
             http://caml.inria.fr/ocaml/distrib.html

We usually do not do alpha or beta pre-releases of Objective Caml,
however enough significant changes have occurred since 3.02 that we
would like to get some user feedback on them.  The changes in question
are:

1- Labels on function arguments are now strict (non-optional) by default,
   and the standard library modules are now not labeled, instead
   labeled versions of some of these modules are provided.
   This change was discussed at length on this list a few months ago,
   and rather than summarizing all the issues, I'm just appending
   Jacques Garrigue's "questions and answers" document.

2- As an alternative to building "custom bytecode executables"
   (containing C code statically linked), the bytecode interpreter now
   supports dynamic loading of the C part of mixed Caml/C libraries.
   This should be mostly transparent to the casual user, hopefully
   making their life easier in some cases.  However, serious testing
   is needed to make sure it works well on a variety of operating systems.

3- The CamlP4 pre-processor-pretty-printer is now integrated in the
   distribution.  Again, this should only make life easier for users,
   although we took advantage of CamlP4's better implementation of
   streams and stream parsers to remove them from the core OCaml language.

The 3.03 alpha distribution is source code only, to encourage testers
to build it themselves and not install it over their working OCaml
3.02 system :-)  This shouldn't be much of a hassle for Unix and
Cygwin users.  For pure Windows users, we are planning a binary
release of 3.03 alpha in a couple of weeks, which should also include
some new Windows-specific code.

Have fun testing this alpha release, and please let us know of your
experience with it.

Full announce with detailed FAQ is available at:
 http://caml.inria.fr/archives/200110/msg00141.html

======================================================================
6) No Caml Weekly News next week
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Once again, I won't be able to produce a Caml Weekly News next week,
sorry. However, if somebody wants to do the job, feel free to do it! ;)

======================================================================

-- 
 David.Mentre@inria.fr
 Opinions expressed here are only mine.