Section: Application Domains

Processing of complex structured data

Like most functional languages, Caml is very well suited to expressing processing and transformations of complex, structured data. It provides concise, high-level declarations for data structures; a very expressive pattern-matching mechanism to destructure data; and compile-time exhaustiveness tests. Languages such as CDuce and OCamlDuce extend these benefits to the handling of semi-structured XML data [39] . Therefore, Caml is an excellent match for applications involving significant amounts of symbolic processing: compilers, program analyzers and theorem provers, but also (and less obviously) distributed collaborative applications, advanced Web applications, financial modeling tools, etc.