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by mumblemumble 1916 days ago
F#'s relationship has been vastly overblown. The truth is that they're about as closely related as C# and Objective-C. In the same way that the overlap between C# and ObjC is basically just the C bit, the overlap between F# and and OCaml is basically just the ML bit. (Actually, even less than that.) You could say that it was inspired by OCaml, but it includes almost none of what makes OCaml OCaml, and adds a lot of its own new ideas.
1 comments
ragnese 1915 days ago
To someone who has a passing familiarity with OCaml, but none with F#, can you elaborate? Because I do hear the comparison frequently.

Do people just draw the comparison because they don't actually know of any other ML languages besides OCaml?

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mumblemumble 1915 days ago
I haven't touched OCaml in a while, but the things it has and F# doesn't that I can remember include: Functors (in the ML sense), camlp4, polymorphic variant types, multiple inheritance, class interfaces.

Things F# has that OCaml lacks: Extension methods, units of measure, type providers, quotations, computation expressions, active patterns, overloading.

Probably most of the F# things could be (and perhaps have been) added to OCaml with camlp4, which is more powerful than F#'s quotations. Versus, F# may never be able to have all of OCaml's ad-hoc polymorphism features. So there's that. But I'm mainly meaning to compare what's actually built into the language.

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