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

Tue Mar 6 00:07:08 PST 2007

Hello,

Here is the latest Caml Weekly News, for the week of February 27 to  
March 06, 2007.

1) OCamlODBC 2.12 is available
2) Some labltk widgets missing
3) ocamlscript 2.0.0

========================================================================
1) OCamlODBC 2.12 is available
Archive: <http://groups.google.com/group/fa.caml/browse_frm/thread/ 
a1055b9008fc5a8c/fd899517039f0c6a#fd899517039f0c6a>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
** Maxence Guesdon announced:

A new release of OCamlODBC is available from the OCamlODBC web site:
   <http://home.gna.org/ocamlodbc/>

OCamlODBC offers bindings to various ODBC drivers.

* Changes: column values of record are now of type string option to
distinguish between "no value" and the "NULL" string. The TINYINT  
type is
now recognized.

* Fix: a bug which resulted in truncated fields and so incorrect values.

Thanks to Christophe Troestler for this contributions.

The toy application Biniki now uses LablGtk2. Examples and Biniki  
were fixed
according to the small change in interface.

========================================================================
2) Some labltk widgets missing
Archive: <http://groups.google.com/group/fa.caml/browse_frm/thread/ 
4ad5f9a1fabe245d/3a9c367677a86ae2#3a9c367677a86ae2>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
** Satoshi Fujiwara asked and Jacques Garrigue answered:

 > Now I'm using 'labltk' with ocaml-3.09.3, and realized that
 > some widgets such as 'labelframe', 'spinbox', etc are missing.
 > I like to using 'labltk' because it's easy to use, but
 > when I check the tk8.4's demo, I found many functions are
 > not supported in 'labltk'.

The widgets supported in camltk/labltk are those of tk8.0.
New widgets were not added to keep compatibility, but since Tcl/Tk
seems to have finally converged on 8.4, this might be a good idea to
add the new widgets now. This is easy to do: mainly editing the
Widgets.src file. But this is time consuming: one has to check by hand
the Tcl/Tk documentation to find all the missing functions and
parameters... So this will probably not be in 3.10.0, but could be
done in a reasonably close future.

 > Is there any plan to upgrading 'labltk'?
 > Should I use 'lablgtk2' or something instead of 'labltk'?

Use the one that fits your needs. There are more widgets in gtk2, but
they can be harder to use.

** Jacques Garrigue then asked and Jacques Garrigue answered:

 > Let me ask another question.
 > # Maybe it's a FAQ...
 > Why camltk and labltk both exists?
 > These look like twins for me.
 > What is the role of these two libraries?
 > (I think if there is no need to use the camltk...)

The original library was CamlTk, and LablTk was actually created by
hacking the automatic generation tool included in CamlTk.
As a result, for a long time only CamlTk was available, and for
instance the MMM web browser was developped using CamlTk. Many
examples are available, and CamlTk is described in one of the rare
books on OCaml written in English.

For all these reasons, it is necessary to continue supporting it, and
the current implementation does it at a very low cost, by using the
same backend.

========================================================================
3) ocamlscript 2.0.0
Archive: <http://groups.google.com/group/fa.caml/browse_frm/thread/ 
632fa2869b2c8ea1/bda053a986ecea0c#bda053a986ecea0c>
------------------------------------------------------------------------
** Martin Jambon announced:

ocamlscript version 2.0.0 was just released. It is considered stable,  
and
there is no big change since the previous release 1.99.5 except for the
packaging and the web page:
   <http://martin.jambon.free.fr/ocamlscript.html>

Ocamlscript 2 derives from David Mentre's original implementation and  
adds
support for findlib packages, camlp4 syntax extensions, ocamllex,
ocamllyacc, input from stdin, script on the command-line, and some  
support
for compilation and linking with other source files. In theory it can  
also
be configured to support any compiled programming language other than
OCaml.

Description:
===========

ocamlscript compiles scripts, i.e. one-file programs, into
natively-compiled binaries, and executes them.

Basically, a script named alpha is compiled into alpha.exe. If alpha.exe
is more recent than alpha, then alpha.exe is executed directly,  
otherwise
alpha is recompiled first.

Compilation commands reside in the first section of the script. They are
written in OCaml and consist normally in setting one or two variables.

Example:
========

The following "getpage" script fetches a web page using the HTTP client
provided by the netclient library/findlib package:

#! /usr/bin/env ocamlscript
Ocaml.packs := [ "netclient" ]
--
match Sys.argv with
     [| _; url |] -> print_string (Http_client.Convenience.http_get url)
   | _ -> prerr_string "Usage: getpage URL\n"; exit 1

For instance, executing "getpage <http://caml.inria.fr>" creates a
getpage.exe file in the same directory as "getpage", runs it and prints
the web page that was requested.

========================================================================
Using folding to read the cwn in vim 6+
------------------------------------------------------------------------
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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========================================================================

-- 
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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