We’ve been working on updating and improving the Learn documents on OCaml.org , and we would love your help and feedback in reviewing them. Add a tutorial about S-expressions ocaml:main ← gpetiot:sexp-tutorial …

I’m not a user of sexp (yet) but I noticed one thing that confused me a little. Up front it says that the JS Core library is not a dependency, which implies it is not required required to use sexplib: The sexplib created by Jane Street provides support for S-expressions in OCaml. It was developpe…

Thank you so much for your feedback! We’ll address these things and let you know when it’s done.

Nicely done :slight_smile: So far, I’ve only dealt with S-expressions for testing purposes. Regarding OCaml to OCaml communication, is there any advantages to use this format vs JSON ? Also, it’d be nice to mention alternatives and explain why and when using them would be appropriate or not. For…

I think this format is smaller than json, especially for representing ocaml data-structures like sum types. It is also easier to write a parser and a printer for it, and to write it by hand (see dune files) which counts for something

It’s definitely smaller, and perhaps attains the most minimal generic textual representation possible. I’m not sure it’s more human-readable.

Doc Review: Updating S-Expressions Tutorial

Learning

dbuenzli September 2, 2023, 3:23pm 7

And it’s not super interoperable, everyone has its own idea on how to represent key value maps see my comment here.

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What is the point of [@@deriving sexp]? Learning	9	1366	February 26, 2023
Using S-expressions for fun and profit Learning	1	242	December 21, 2025
Why does Jane Street use s-expressions so much? Community	2	3374	January 17, 2020
Combinator library for extracting data for s-exps? Community	48	2939	August 6, 2022
Do you use Core (or other Jane Street libs)? Tell us how! Community	48	6987	August 24, 2021

Doc Review: Updating S-Expressions Tutorial

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