[cwn] Attn: Development Editor, Latest Caml Weekly News

Tue Jul 3 01:27:08 PDT 2007

Hello,

Here is the latest Caml Weekly News, for the week of June 26 to July  
03, 2007.

1) The Implicit Accumulator: a design pattern using optional arguments
2) An OCaml toplevel IRC bot
3) pattern guards
4) Adding another "let ... in"-like construct for fontification/ 
indentation

========================================================================
1) The Implicit Accumulator: a design pattern using optional arguments
Archive: <http://groups.google.com/group/fa.caml/browse_frm/thread/ 
5505600e34d72409/258b9c92560b3670#258b9c92560b3670>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
** Jon Harrop said, spawning a huge thread:

I can't find the thread where we were talking about design patterns  
recently
but I'd like to note a design pattern that works nicely in OCaml.  
I'll call
it "The Implicit Accumulator".
ML programmers often use nested auxiliary functions or separate  
functions to
handle base cases. For example, writing rev in terms of rev_append:
# let rec rev_append l1 l2 = match l1 with
     | [] -> l2
     | a :: l -> rev_append l (a :: l2);;
val rev_append : 'a list -> 'a list -> 'a list = <fun>
# let rev l = rev_append l [];;
val rev : 'a list -> 'a list = <fun>
Provided performance is unimportant, you can make the accumulator  
implicit in
OCaml by specifying the default value in an optional argument instead of
having a separate function:
# let rec rev ?(back=[]) = function
     | [] -> back
     | h::t -> rev ~back:(h::back) t;;
val rev : ?back:'a list -> 'a list -> 'a list = <fun>
When you don't want the auxiliary (rev_append) function, I think this  
style
results in shorter and clearer code. I used it in the "search"  
function of my
Sudoku solver, for example:
let rec search ?(x=0) ?(y=0) f accu = match x, y with
     9, y -> search ~x:0 ~y:(y+1) f accu (* Next row *)
   | 0, 9 -> f accu                      (* Found a solution *)
   | x, y ->
       if m.(y).[x] <> '0' then search ~x:(x+1) ~y f accu else
         fold (fun accu n ->
                 let n = Char.chr (n + 48) in
                 if invalid x y n then accu else
                   (m.(y).[x] <- n;
                    let accu = search ~x:(x+1) ~y f accu in
                    m.(y).[x] <- '0';
                    accu)) accu 1 10
and it crops up quite a lot in addition to all of the "conventional"  
uses of
optional arguments.

** Quôc Peyrot then said (there are many replies which you may read  
online):

It's funny that you speak about this, because I recently (few days
ago) used
a pattern similar to yours, but to actually improve performances.
I had something like that (which is quite different than my actual
code, but
the idea is the same):
let encrypt str =
    let len = String.length str in
    let encrypted = String.create len in
    (* ... *)
    encrypted
(*...*)
for i = 0 to 10000000 do
    let encrypted = encrypt str in
    (* do something on the result *)
done
Which is slow due to the string allocation happening each time we
call "encrypt"
So I rewrote it like that:
let encrypt ?encrypted str =
    let len = String.length str in
    let result = match encrypted with
      | None -> String.create len
      | Some s -> s
    in
    (* ... *)
    result
(* ... *)
let encrypted = String.create (String.length str) in
for i = 0 to 1000000000 do
    let encrypted = encrypt ~encrypted str in
    (* ... *)
done
Which gave me more than a 2x speedup while still being able to call a
simple:
let encrypted = encrypt str
during normal usage
I was quite happy with this solution, but maybe there is something
more elegant to do?
(I'm still in the process of learning good optimization patterns in
ocaml which preserve readability)

========================================================================
2) An OCaml toplevel IRC bot
Archive: <http://groups.google.com/group/fa.caml/browse_frm/thread/ 
c2efb7fbbbc57095/edf94fe14926b0e5#edf94fe14926b0e5>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
** Richard Jones announced:

Appearing from time to time on #ocaml on FreeNode.
<http://annexia.org/tmp/xavierbot-0.1.tar.gz>

========================================================================
3) pattern guards
Archive: <http://groups.google.com/group/fa.caml/browse_frm/thread/ 
b5fceca4e37bbed6/b0ec5324180bfeba#b0ec5324180bfeba>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
** Jeremy Yallop announced:

I'm pleased to announce the initial release of `patterns', an OCaml
extension providing general-purposes additions to pattern matching.
This release includes a single feature: "pattern guards"; others will
be made available in the near future.
You can download patterns from
     <http://code.google.com/p/ocaml-patterns/>
Pattern guards generalize "when"-guards to allow arbitrary pattern
matching with binding.  After each pattern in a match you can write
one or more binding phrases as follows:
    match e with
      | patt1 with p1 = e1
              ...
              with pn = en
           -> e
      | patt2 ...
The expressions e1 ... en are evaluated in turn and matched with
the corresponding patterns p1 ... pn until either a match fails (in
which case matching proceeds with patt2 etc.) or all matches
succeed.  Any variables bound in p1 ... pn are in scope within
subsequent guards and within e.
For example, given a function
     val lookup : 'a -> ('a * 'b) list -> 'b option
you might write the following
     let f env = function
      | Var x
           with Some v = lookup x env -> ... v ...
instead of the less elegant and less efficient
     let f env = function
      | Var x
           when mem_assoc x env -> ... assoc x env ...
Pattern guards and regular guards can be freely intermixed; for
example, you can write
    match e with
      | patt when c1
             with patt1 = e1
             when c2
             with patt2 = e2 -> e
      | ...
Pattern guards were proposed (for Haskell) in
     Martin Erwig and Simon Peyton Jones
     Pattern Guards and Transformational Patterns
     Haskell Workshop, 2000
See also: <http://research.microsoft.com/~simonpj/Haskell/guards.html>

========================================================================
4) Adding another "let ... in"-like construct for fontification/ 
indentation
Archive: <http://groups.google.com/group/fa.caml/browse_frm/thread/ 
a767d66c1721a432/19eb32a9dbb96f11#19eb32a9dbb96f11>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
** Denis Bueno asked and Philippe Wang answered:

 > In tuareg-mode, is there a simple way to add support for indentation
 > for a new syntactic construct that behaves exactly like "let ... in
 > ..."?  I'd like "def ... in ..." to behave the same way.  I'm  
thinking
 > of some code I can stuff in my .emacs, hopefuly, as opposed to a
 > modification of tuareg.el.
 > I'd like to be able to write:
 >    let foo a b = a + b in
 >    def hi(x) = print_int x; 0 in
 >    let bar x = x in
 >      <some body where foo and hi are in scope>
 > i.e. I'd like to interleave let .. in ... and def ... in ..., and  
have
 > them cooperate.
 > I looked around tuareg.el and found a bunch of places where "let" is
 > mentioned in a regexp, and even found `tuareg-make-find-kwop-regexp',
 > whose doc string says "Make a custom indentation regexp".  That doc
 > string seems like it's what I want, but that function has no side
 > effects, so clearly it's not the whole story.
 > What I'm eventually shooting for is a tuareg mode that "knows" about
 > Jocaml syntax, since I'm fiddling around with that for the moment.
 > There are more new pieces of syntax on Jocaml (new keywords "spawn"
 > and "reply to") which seem pretty simple to support, but I haven't
 > thought about them very much.
 > Thanks in advance.

Hi,
I sent the following text last week but, I don't know why, it got  
lost...
Well, I played a little bit with tuareg, to try to adapt it to JoCaml.
The keywords are well colored (well, I think they are), but the
indentation is not finished (well, let's say it : it's wrong).
You can get what I have done if ever you are interested :
<http://philippewang.info/cs/misc/juareg-mode-1.46.2.tar.gz>
(there is in particular a bug : a function call finds nil... why why why
is dynamic typing so mean with me...)
Well, I've spent only a few minutes on it, plus a few hours trying to
catch bugs, most of which I haven't caught.
I have no idea if someone else is working on it, I just wanted to "play"
with elisp...
But I don't have time to continue right now, that's the reason why I
give you the sources.
Cheers,
Philippe Wang
mail[at]philippewang.info
PS :
if ever you want to compare tuareg sources with juareg sources, I
suggest you apply :
for i in * ; sed -i -e 's/juareg/tuareg/g' -e 's/jocaml/ocaml/g' $i ;  
done
on the sources first.
The advantage in naming it juareg instead of tuareg is that it can be
used without interfering with tuareg.

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Using folding to read the cwn in vim 6+
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Here is a quick trick to help you read this CWN if you are viewing it  
using
vim (version 6 or greater).

:set foldmethod=expr
:set foldexpr=getline(v:lnum)=~'^=\\{78}$'?'<1':1
zM
If you know of a better way, please let me know.

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Old cwn
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========================================================================

-- 
Alan Schmitt <http://alan.petitepomme.net/>

The hacker: someone who figured things out and made something cool  
happen.
  .O.
  ..O
  OOO

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