Caml is a dialect of ML (and is that upon which the well-known OCaml is based).

ML is a statically and strongly typed (mostly) functional language (or, perhaps more accurately, family of languages). It has nice things like type inferencing (which means that though the language is statically typed you very rarely have to explicitly declare the type of things - the compiler figures them out on its own) and pattern matching (which allows one to define many functions very naturally). It's not a "pure" functional language, which is to say that imperative features are available if one needs them.

Another source of information besides your Caml link is SML of New Jersey (I think there is some historical information there). As I understand it, the Caml branch of ML diverged before Standard ML was created, which explains the different syntaxes, etc. The ideas seem to be mostly the same, though.

Is that what you wanted to know, or are you looking for something else?

Update: I should have mentioned that MLs are strict rather than lazy - I don't want to get the Haskell people on my case for not bringing that up. :-)

In reply to Caml/OCaml/ML and so on by hding
in thread Fourth ICFP Programming Contest by princepawn

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