Objective Caml


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Installation under Linux
The Linux installation also has an easy-to-install binary distribution in the form of an
rpm. package. Installation from source is described in section 1. The file to download
is: ocaml-2.04-2.i386.rpm which will be used as follows with root privileges:


Installation under MacOS
The MacOS distribution is also in the form of a self-extracting binary. The file to
download is: ocaml-2.04-mac.sea.bin which is compressed. Use your favorite software


Installation from source under Unix
Objective Caml can be installed on systems in the Unix family from the source distribution.
Indeed it will be necessary to compile the Objective Caml system. To do
this, one must either have a C compiler on one’s Unix, machine, which is generally
the case, or download one such as gcc which works on most Unix. systems. The Objective
Caml distribution file containing the source is: ocaml-2.04.tar.gz. The file
INSTALL describes, in a very clear way, the various stages of configuring, making, and
then installing the binaries.


Installation of the HTML documentation
Objective Caml’s English documentation is present also in the form of a hierarchy of
HTML files which can be found in the docs directory of the CD-ROM.
This documentation is a reference manual. It is not easy reading for the beginner.
Nevertheless it is quite useful as a description of the language, its tools, and its libraries.
It will soon become indispensable for anyone who hopes to write a program of more
than ten lines.


Testing the installation
Once installation of the Objective Caml development environment is done, it is necessary
to test it, mainly to verify the search paths for executables and libraries. The
simplest way is to launch the interactive toplevel of the system and write the first little
program that follows: