13:52 <puffin> hello?

13:59 <smkl> hi puffin

14:01 <puffin> I've recently (re)discovered O'Caml, which is fast becoming my new Favourite Language.

14:02 <puffin> But this channel is a bit quiet to just babble excitedly into... :-)

14:10 <Yurik_> puffin: subscribe to mail list =)

14:10 <smkl> in channels like this, the discussion is mostly newbie questions or offtopic noise. this channel is too small for noise, and perhaps ocaml doesn't have enough undocumented oddities for questions

14:17 <puffin> fortunately camlp4 seems to have quite a few undocumented pieces :-)

14:58 <mockturtle> ah, inria is back up :)

17:16 <DemiUni> Hmm... it would be nice if one could interface with a db in a statically typed way.. shuffling all the data into a record feels a bit inferior...

17:25 <puffin> what is the "standard" database interface? Google isn't turning up anything that sounds right.

17:26 <puffin> is it OCamlODBC

17:26 <puffin> ?

17:27 <DemiUni> I'd recommend looking at the humps or http://www.npc.de/ocaml/linkdb/

17:30 <smkl> DemiUni: do you store your data in objects?

17:32 <DemiUni> smkl: Actually I'm investigating the various possibilities to use ocaml to build web applications, I haven't seen any apache modules so far though (although I could make cgis of course).

17:33 <DemiUni> It would be quite nice to treat the database as a statically typed table/hash/...

17:33 <Yurik> owll: hi

17:33 <owll> re

17:38 <DemiUni> (And compromizing design for dubious efficiency for that matter.)

17:38 <smkl> the cost of a method call should be about the same as c++ method call

17:39 <DemiUni> Then records have better efficiency? (Especially since I can't expect the functions to be inlined.)

17:40 <smkl> sure. but i don't know how big difference that makes in a real application

17:41 <DemiUni> Yes, any application is probably shuffling more data around to make it matter anyway.

17:50 <smkl> i've done some stuff to help writing graphical editors and text based IO for different datatypes. interfacing with databases and web can probably be done in similar way

17:53 <DemiUni> ocamlmysql has conversion functions to and from ml, if I just wrap up all that I can have a nice statically typed db interface I guess, the same should be done for the cgi interface probably

17:57 <smkl> my idea is to have a datatype that can save, load and edit values of a type for the base types like ints, floats and strings, and then construct editors for list and tuples from these structures. this can be extended to sums and records (or objects) by just listing their fields

18:02 <smkl> this way, you only need to write one piece of code, and that will handle both IO and graphical editing