On Friday 02 November 2007 13:26, David Pollak wrote: > One could always use Scala... :-) > > I have not used F#, but my understanding is that the F# team and the Scala > team are personal friends and research collaborators and will often > integrate the best of each language into the other.
There are various aspects of languages like OCaml that I consider to be of critical importance. Pattern matching, type inference and static checking are among those. F# does quite well in reimplementing them with the exception that its statically checked pattern matching gives poor error messages (simply stating when a pattern is incomplete but not describing how by giving examples, as OCaml does). However, Scala is far behind in many of these respects and also incorporates a lot of needless verbosity from Java. For example, Scala only recently acquired the ability to perform the most rudimentary forms of exhaustiveness checking. The Eclipse plugin for Scala is behind F#'s (rather lame) Visual Studio plug-in which is, in turn, far behind the capabilities of OCaml and Emacs. These differences put OCaml a league ahead as far as I'm concerned. Thanks to Microsoft, .NET will catch up and I think it would be great if the JVM could catchup as well. For this to happen, someone must take the results of previous research on ML and CAML and apply it to the creation of a new language and development environment that targets the JVM. -- Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd. http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?e --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "JVM Languages" group. To post to this group, send email to jvm-languages@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/jvm-languages?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
