Section: Application Domains

Rapid development

Static typing is often criticized as being verbose (due to the additional type declarations required) and inflexible (due to, for instance, class hierarchies that must be fixed in advance). Its combination with type inference, as in the Caml language, substantially diminishes the importance of these problems: type inference allows programs to be initially written with few or no type declarations; moreover, the OCaml approach to object-oriented programming completely separates the class inheritance hierarchy from the type compatibility relation. Therefore, the Caml language is highly suitable for fast prototyping and the gradual evolution of software prototypes into final applications, as advocated by the popular “extreme programming” methodology.