From: Alan Schmitt <alan.schmitt@inria.fr> To: lwn@lwn.net Subject: Attn: Development Editor, Latest Caml Weekly News Date: Tue, 14 May 2002 19:31:49 +0200 Hello, Here is the latest Caml Weekly News, weeks 7 to 14 may, 2002. 1) gmetadom (alias gdome2) released 2) gdome2-xslt released 3) lablgtkmathview released 4) generating random variables 5) Graphics without open_graph? 6) camomile-0.2.1 7) FFTW interface 8) "Functional Unparsing" benchmark results links fixed ====================================================================== 1) gmetadom (alias gdome2) released ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Claudio Sacerdoti Coen announced: Hi Ocamlers, I am proud to announce the release of gmetadom (alias gdome2). gmetadom is a binding to gdome2, the GNU DOM Level 2 implementation. The code is automatically generated (by means of XSLT) from the W3C DOM Level 2 Recomendation (Core and Events modules). In this way making new bindings for new DOM modules is extremely quick and easy. Moreover, the API is exactly the one proposed by W3C, enhancing portability of already developed code. Having a binding to gdome2 paves the way to the binding of other widgets based on gdome2. In particular, bindings are already available for the GtkMathView widget. gmetadom: http://sourceforge.net/projects/gmetadom/ gdome2: http://phd.cs.unibo.it/gdome2 ====================================================================== 2) gdome2-xslt released ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Claudio Sacerdoti Coen announced: Hi Ocamlers! I am proud to announce the release of gdome2-xslt. gdome2-xslt is a minimal API to apply XSLT stylesheets to gdome2 documents. It is based on libxslt (which is very performant) and requires the gmetadom binding. gdome2-xslt: http://www.cs.unibo.it/helm/gdome_xslt/index.html gmetadom: http://sourceforge.net/projects/gmetadom/ ====================================================================== 3) lablgtkmathview released ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Claudio Sacerdoti Coen announced: Hi Ocamlers! I am proud to announce the release of lablgtkmathview version 0.3.0. lablgtkmathview is a lablgtk binding to GtkMathView, a fully compliant widget to render MathML documents and print them to PostScript. GtkMathView is based on gdome2. Hence lablgtkmathview input are gdome2 (alias gmetadom) DOM trees, which can also be produced on-the-fly using gdome2-xslt to apply XSLT stylesheets. lablgtkmathview: http://www.cs.unibo.it/helm/mml-widget/index.html gmetadom: http://sourceforge.net/projects/gmetadom/ ====================================================================== 4) generating random variables ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Henri Dubois-Ferriere asked: Hello, For some simulation studies, I need to generate exponential, gaussian, and poisson random variables. Maybe also some more exotic ones a little later on. I have looked around, but did not seem to find any available libraries for generating random variables (except of course for the uniform variables in Random). Can anyone point me to such a thing, if it exists? David Chase answered: Have you considered http://www.taygeta.com/random/gaussian.html Google found it for me. I don't know if that is enough detail for you. Olivier Andrieu also answered: You could use GSL, the GNU scientific library (http://sources.redhat.com/gsl/). It's written in C of course. I've made some bindings (not for everything, but the RNGs and random distributions are working). If you're interested, I can send you the whole stuff. and Shawn Wagner answered: My Stew library (Available at http://raevnos.pennmush.org/code/ocaml.html) includes some random number stuff. There are a few modules for random number distributions (Functorized so you can use your choice of actual (P)RNG generators with them; I like the Mersenne Twister, also part of the library.), and I just added exponential and poisson distributions after seeing your email. :) ====================================================================== 5) Graphics without open_graph? ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Oliver Bandel asked and Pierre Weis answered: > Interesting in the Graphics-Lib is, that the names of the > graphics-functions are the same as in PostScript. > It would be nice to have the possibility to directly > write PostScript-Files with that Library too. :) > > Ciao, > Oliver Hi, This possibility exists since 1 or 2 years with the Graphps module which is distributed in the Caml bazar. Furthermore this library has a (tiny) website of its own! (Have a look to http://pauillac.inria.fr/graphps/) It is fully documented and can be used as a replacement of the Graphics module; then your program will generate a postscript (or encapsulated postscript file) instead of drawing on the screen. Get the library at the used place, file graphps-1.0.tgz: ftp.inria.fr/lang/caml-light/bazar-ocaml/ (Caml Light users may find it in .../bazar-cl/graphps/graphps-1.0.tgz) Hence, with Graphps, a program using the Graphics library not only can work without any window manager, but it can even work on a computer without screen! (Not a crazy idea by the way: I've done it once to generate images from home, telneting on an INRIA destop that was running a program using graphps :) The library is mature, but any new idea, remark, enhancement, or, even better, any code contribution is warmly welcomed. ====================================================================== 6) camomile-0.2.1 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Yamagata Yoriyuki announced: Camomile-0.2.1 is released. Ambition of Camomile project is to create multilingual (Unicode) replacement of ocaml stdlib. Currently, camomile provides * Unicode data types * Character info * Legacy encodings * Unicode Normalforms (NFC, NFKC, NFD, NFKD) * Case mappings * Sorting via Unicode Collation Algorithm. For download and more information, see our home page. http://camomile.sourceforge.net We would appreciate your feed back. ====================================================================== 7) FFTW interface ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Christophe TROESTLER announced: Dear caml riders, I have started to write an interface to the FFTW library (http://www.fftw.org/). It is available at http://www.umh.ac.be/math/an/programs.html Since it uses the complex module and complex bigarrays, you need an OCaml CVS version to compile it. At the moment the 1D complex transforms are usable as well as the import/export of wisdom. All comments are welcome -- in particular on the thread and callback portions of the code. I will try to complete the code ASAP. and Markus Mottl answered: A few weeks ago I played around with the FFTW and also wrote a small interface. Due to lack of time I had to discontinue the project, but maybe you can find one or the other idea in my code that you might want to adopt. I have put the sources here: http://www.oefai.at/~markus/tmp Writing an interface that supports all FFTW-features in a convenient way is quite non-trivial. Maybe you want to place your project at SourceForge so that others can also contribute some code. ====================================================================== 8) "Functional Unparsing" benchmark results links fixed ---------------------------------------------------------------------- T. Kurt Bond announced and corrected: I've fixed the broken links to postscript and PDF versions of the results of benchmarking "Functional Unparsing" style output functions against the equivalent O'Caml and C printf functions. I apologize for the inconvenience, and thank those who pointed out the problem. Earlier today I wrote: > I've updated the software slightly and included the results and a > short explanation (in postscript and PDF) on that page of some > benchmarking I did that shows that the Cpsio functions are faster than > the equivalent OCaml printf functions in byte-code, and often faster > in native-code, despite doing more garbage collecting. Results are > also compared to the equivalent C printf functions. > > The web page again is: > > http://tkb.mpl.com/~tkb/software.html ====================================================================== Alan Schmitt -- The hacker: someone who figured things out and made something cool happen.