OCaml for the impatient - part 1, "Hello, world!"

After an inspiring presentation by Tom Stuart at LRUG earlier this week, I decided to have a go at learning a functional programming language. I picked OCaml, partly on recommendation from Tom, although he's since changed his advice to recommend Clojure because of it's "smart and comprehensive treatment of mutable state".

I found quite a few introductions to OCaml, but many of them seem quite theoretical and a bit dry. Plus, I'm really impatient. I tend to learn best by just diving in and trying to perform a real-world task. So, I decided to start by writing a basic filter to take apache access log lines and spit out some fields in CSV form.


I know this is not necessarily the best task for OCaml, and I'm sure my coding style is missing the point and doing many things the 'wrong' way. But, at least it's a practical way to get my hands dirty with the language.

First of all, let's do the traditional "Hello, world!" exercise;

1. Installing OCaml

Lots of instructions for various platforms here;

http://wiki.cocan.org/getting_started_with_ocaml

I used the INRIA binary on Mac OS X.

2. Hello World

A basic hello world program in OCaml. Using a text editor (preferably vim, but I've heard that other programs sort of work), put the following into a file called "hello.ml"


Printf.printf "Hello, world!\n";;


Some points to note;

1. The 'printf' function comes from the 'Printf' module. This module is available to all programs, so there's no need to do anything special to gain access to it.

2. ";;" denotes the end of a chunk of code.

You can run this code interactively using the "ocaml toplevel"



$ ocaml
Objective Caml version 3.10.1

# Printf.printf "Hello, world!\n";; <--- type this and press enter Hello, world! - : unit = () # <-------- Ctrl-D to exit $

To run the program from the command-line there are several options.

Option 1


$ ocaml hello.ml


This is the easiest way, using the ocaml interpreter.

Option 2


$ ocamlc hello.ml -o hello
$ ./hello


This creates an executable "hello" file of OCaml bytecode, which should run on any machine with the OCaml bytecode interpreter, "ocamlrun" installed. It also creates a "hello.cmo" and "hello.cmi" file, which are OCaml object and interface files, respectively. This seems to be an intermediate step, since "hello" runs just fine if you delete them.

Option 3


$ ocamlopt hello.ml -o hello
$ ./hello


This time, "hello" is a compiled binary which can run standalone. There will also be the "hello.cmi" file, as well as "hello.cmx" (OCaml *native* object file), and "hello.o" (object file for your OS).

The interactive toplevel is great for noodling around, and option 1 is what I spend most of my time doing. Option 3 is what I will use if and when I write something that I want to use in production.

So, that's "Hello, world" out of the way. In the next part, we'll look at reading from standard input and writing to standard output.

OCaml for the impatient - part 2, reading standard input