Categorical Abstract Machine Language

language (Originally "CAML" - Categorical Abstract Machine

Language) A version of ML by G. Huet, G. Cousineau, Ascander

Suarez, Pierre Weis, Michel Mauny and others of INRIA and

ENS. CAML is intermediate between LCF ML and SML

[in what sense?].

It has first-class functions, static type inference with

polymorphic types, user-defined variant types and producttypes, and pattern matching. It is built on a proprietary

run-time system.

The CAML V3.1 implementation added lazy and mutable data

structures, a "grammar" mechanism for interfacing with the

Yacc parser generator, pretty-printing tools,

high-performance arbitrary-precision arithmetic, and a

complete library. CAML V3 is often nicknamed "heavy CAML",

because of its heavy memory and CPU requirements compared to

Caml Light.

in 1990 Xavier Leroy and Damien Doligez designed a new

implementation called Caml Light, freeing the previous

implementation from too many experimental high-level features,

and more importantly, from the old Le_Lisp back-end.

Following the addition of a native-code compiler and a

powerful module system in 1995 and of the object and

class layer in 1996, the project's name was changed to

Objective Caml.

["The CAML Reference Manual", P. Weis et al, TR INRIA-ENS,

1989].

(2003-04-12)