NML for the Connoiseur

["David McClain" <dmcclain(at)azstarnet.com>]

Dear OCaml Enthusiasts,

It has been stewing for more than a year now, a continuing work in progress,
but it is high time that I release a matured copy of the code and sources to
the world. NML (Not ML, Numeric Modeling Language, Numeric ML, Nearly ML,
...) is an interactive, dynamically typed, tail pure, compiled (to native
code closures) functional language, whose syntax closely follows that of
OCaml, but where all math operations are overloaded and vectorized on real
and complex data in the form of lists, vectors, multidimensional arrays,
tuples, etc.

It has proven itself in the field for the past 9 months. Numerous samples
are included with the sources, including a translation of Norvig's Prolog
interpreter (just a toy... but it shows the power of NML for non-numeric as
well as numeric problems). NML is very fast!!! on large array-based
problems, and is reasonably fast on non-numeric problems (probably not as
efficient as OCaml) but certainly a lot easier to code interactively at the
command line (no type inferencing and no type checking... hence inherently
unsafe).

The application and its sources presently runs on Win/NT 4.0 and Linux. But
the Linux port has been ignored for the past 5 months. It produces very nice
looking graphics, 2-D data plots, pseudo-color image displays, and shaded
surface plots. It is shareware in the sense of the OCaml license, and a
request that acknowledgement be given to the original authors. Source
consists of about 28K lines of OCaml, and 10K lines of supporting C/C++
code.

You can find more about it at
http://www.azstarnet.com/~dmcclain/nmlpromo.html
and the zipped sources and NML.exe at
http://www.azstarnet.com/~dmcclain/nml.zip  (1100 KB).

Many thanks to Xavier and the others at INRIA for their wonderful language
system!!

- D. McClain, Sr. Scientist
Raytheon Systems Co.
Tucson, AZ