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by sally1620 1645 days ago
Don Syme explains in history of F# that there were multiple efforts to port OCaml to .NET, (Nemerle comes to mind), but none of those felt natural to use.

For F#, they started with OCaml syntax and semantics; then modified it to make it a true .NET language. They added features that were not in OCaml like inheritance & interfaces. and removed features that were unnecessary in .NET like functors.

https://fsharp.org/history/hopl-final/hopl-fsharp.pdf Early F# compiler even had ml-compatibility mode which would make syntax closer to OCaml, it was probably used for bootstrapping.
1 comments
klibertp 1645 days ago
Yes.

It was wrong of me to only mention the "limitations" (compared to OCaml) that "will drive you nuts", while saying nothing about extensions/advantages of F# - because, obviously, it does have some. This:

    printfn "%s" ((3.0 + 3.0).ToString())
may seem normal enough to onlookers, but being able to write it (more precisely, the mechanisms that make it possible) in F# can be seen as a definitive advantage over OCaml, where normal functions cannot be overloaded to work on multiple types. At least without explicitly handling it yourself, which can be a lot of work.

What I really wanted to say, but somehow failed, is that F# is not OCaml - it's a language in its own right, with both good and bad sides, which don't align with those of OCaml particularly well (and sometimes not at all). F# and OCaml share some semantic and syntactic features, but they are not "dialects" of each other (no matter which way you want to spin it), they have very different sets of trade-offs, and probably shouldn't be directly compared (even if such comparison was OK historically).

I think I failed to convey this properly because I was angry that "someone on the Internet!!!" mentioned F# in an OCaml thread "AGAIN!!!", even though it's definitely one of the biggest developments/successes on the OCaml side in recent memory. I mean, it's like you're having a party to celebrate your promotion, only to have that one person tell you all about how their cousin is better than you in every respect, and he didn't even need to work that hard for it, so you're just slow. It was strangely disconcerting, but I should have reacted less emotionally.

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