Functional Programming

bachelor program

VO2 + PS1 WS 2009/2010 703017 + 703018

Frequently Asked Questions

This page will be populated with reasonable questions, asked during the lecture or the exercises, or sent as feedback.

How do I get command line history and completion for `ocaml`?

Just use rlwrap (installed on ZID machines). Either call ocaml as follows:


 $ rlwrap ocaml

or set following alias (e.g., in your .bashrc):


 alias ocaml="rlwrap ocaml"

How to use `ocamlbuild`?

There a different applications of ocamlbuild:

Compiling the file prog.ml as bytecode executable:
$ ocamlbuild prog.byte
Compiling an interpreter name.top in which some modules are preloaded. First create a file name.mltop containing one module per line that should be preloaded on startup. Second
$ ocamlbuild name.top

How can I customize my own interpreter?

Every time an interpreter is started (either ocaml or something like name.top from above) the current directory is checked for the file .ocamlinit. If it exists, its content is executed as if you would have typed it in the interpreter. (Alternatively the flag -init <file> can be used to load the file <file>.)

This is for example useful to change to the directory _build on startup (which is the default output location of ocamlbuild). The corresponding toplevel directive is #cd "_build";;.

How to use the sourcecode archives?

Let's take w03.tgz as example. Download the archive

  $ wget http://cl-informatik.uibk.ac.at/teaching/ws09/fp/src/w03.tgz

extract the archive

  $ tar -xzf w03.tgz

and change into the resulting directory w03

  $ cd w03

To generate an OCaml interpreter in which all modules of the archive are preloaded use

  $ ocamlbuild w03.top

This command reads the file w03.mltop (which you can extend by your own modules of course). To start the interpreter use

  $ rlwrap ./w03.top

now to use, e.g., the function of_string of the module Strng type

          Objective Caml version 3.11.0
  # Strng.of_string;;
  - : string -> char list = <fun>