OCaml at First Glance

[dbuenzli]

@bbatsov

My point here is that you have to turn to external libraries even for things that are normally built-in in most languages, which means more learning overhead.

In the particular case of Unicode that is not really true.

If you take go as an example, it provides the same string model as OCaml does (sequences of bytes) aswell as UTF-{8,16} codecs, which the Stdlib now also fully provides.

Beyond that it seems the only thing it provides over what OCaml does is this outdated (Unicode v13.0.0) random selection of Unicode character properties – for that you will need to use uucp (which is not outdated).

Beyond that most other languages will just provide you with a broken Unicode string representation.

@bbatsov

Do you seriously that most people would figure out they need something that does “Unicode text normalization/segmentation”?

I seriously think that if you know what you are doing that provides you with an excellent answer.

@bbatsov

I myself googled for “working with unicode strings in ocaml”.

That’s maybe the problem, what is your definition of “working with unicode strings in OCaml” ? As far as Unicode processing is concerned this is a very vague request.