Re: [Orgmode] [babel] Re: org-babel and OCaml

[Eric Schulte]

Hi Erik,

address@hidden (Erik L. Arneson) writes:

> "Eric Schulte" <address@hidden> writes:
>> address@hidden (Erik L. Arneson) writes:
>>> Great, I will start hacking away at it.  What's the process I need to go
>>> through to sign FSF papers?
>>
>> See http://orgmode.org/worg/org-contribute.php#sec-2 for information on
>> FSF copyright assignment.
>
> I've submitted the paperwork, so now I'm just waiting to hear back from
> them.  I'm still curious, though, as to how much you'd like me to change the
> back-end behavior (i.e. the generated OCaml code and the way return
> values are read) before checking with the community for their thoughts
> and such.
>

Judging from the traffic on the mailing list I don't think there are
many users of the Babel ocaml implementation.

You're certainly free to experiment with as wide of a range of
implementation options as you like.  Given that any patches will
necessarily move through this list, I think that we're guaranteed that
anyone interested in the ob-ocaml implementation will have a chance to
participate in the development.

>
> The first table I tried to test on looked something like this:
>
> #+tblname: test
> | John | 5 | 1.02 |
> | Mary | 6 | 9.00 |
> | Bob  | 7 | 0.50 |
>
> With the patch you recently submitted, this makes an invalid array of
> arrays in OCaml, so that's why I was thinking it should generate an
> array of tuples instead, so the output might look like this:
>
> let test = 
>   [| ("John", 5, 1.02);
>      ("Mary", 6, 9.00);
>      ("Bob", 7, 0.50) |]
>

The only issue I see with that approach is that different dimensions of
the incoming value are treated differently, i.e. the first dimension is
an array, the second is a tuple, how would the third of fourth
dimensions be represented?

It looks like nested arrays may be possible using Matrix primitives (see
[1]) maybe this would be preferable?

>
> It doesn't seem like many people are using ob-ocaml.el yet, so I can
> probably just make that change, document it, and then hope for the best,
> right?

I'd recommend that you experiment with new changes locally, and then
send patches to the list where they can be reviewed and applied.

Cheers -- Eric

Footnotes: 
[1]  http://caml.inria.fr/resources/doc/faq/core.en.html#data-structures