Exploring the breadth of software engineering.
In the last post I talked about building an OCaml project using Dune. In this post I continue with a more complex project. The project interfaces OCaml and PostgreSQL (a database system) with Caqti (a third-party library that provides type-safe abstraction for interfacing with databases). I loosely follow this tutorial, but instead of using Jbuilder…
Dune is a popular OCaml build tool. If you haven’t already, I encourage you to give it a try! Especially if you are building a project that involves more components. See other compiling options here. You can install Dune using OPAM by running (in your system or a particular switch)
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opam install dune |
Writing a Dune File…
Recall in lambda calculus, two items side by side is an application. One applies the left item (the function) to the right item (the input). E.g.:
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f x |
is read as “apply f to x“, in which f and x can be any lambda expressions. Therefore, f and/or x may be expressions that can be evaluated first. …
My OCaml development environment in Debian has been working well since I set it up. In this post I talk about setting up Merlin in vim and neovim. See this discussion for other well-liked OCaml environment set up. I’ve been using neovim and I like it so I’ll stick with this for now. Setting Up…
Currying Recall that in lambda calculus, a function can have more than one input, each preceded by a λ symbol. Another way of thinking about more than one input is currying. Currying a function of two inputs turns that function into a function with one input by passing one of the inputs into it. In other…
In this post I’ll go through some exercises and encode some recursive functions with the Y combinator. Encoding with rec Continuing on from my last post, Professor Hutton gave us two exercises in the Y combinator video: Encode loop (the function that just calls itself) with rec. I.e.,
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loop = rec (?) |
Encode the factorial function with rec. I.e.,…
In the last post I talked about how powerful lambda calculus is. In this post I further proves the point by encoding recursion in it. This enables you to do recursion in any languages! If you haven’t read my last post already, please do so! It’d be easier for you to follow this post, especially…
I’ve long since heard of “Lambda Calculus” but I didn’t really know what it is about until I saw this video. It got me super excited! What I love about it is that it’s built on almost nothing! Only the concept of functions. It’s so simple and elegant! Professor Graham Hutton also listed good reasons to…
In this post I share how I switched to Debian and set up a development environment for OCaml. As mentioned in this post, I was running NixOS on my machine, but getting it set up comfortably for OCaml seems challenging. Instead of fighting with the OS, I decided to switch to Debian because I love…
I talked about how I wrote imperative merge sort in OCaml earlier. I have been thinking about improving it because it was not as tidy as I’d like. I learnt a few things in the process: Gain as much information as you can to debug. E.g., it can help to print out intermediate results. I…