Alp Mestan’s Corner

Hi,

It’s been some days I was working on a very interesting project…
Many of you probably know Internet Relay Chat (IRC), in particular the Freenode network. You can access it through an IRC Client, the most known being XChat. The host is irc.freenode.net, on port 6667.
Some of you are used to bots on IRC, often provided by regular IRC users, for their prefered language/tool/etc. There is lambdabot on the #haskell channel, geordi on the ##C++ channel, etc. I’ve also seen that Richard WM Jones had worked on a similar bot for the #ocaml channel, xavierbot. But I wasn’t quite satisfied with it as it was nearly not written in OCaml, and I also wanted to develop one myself.

And… it’s done ! I’m proud to introduce you mlbot, written in OCaml, for OCaml, in 144 LoC for the moment. The code will be online soon on mlbot’s webpage : http://mestan.fr/ocaml/mlbot/

Here is an example of interaction with mlbot :

<Alpounet> > List.fold_right (+) [1;2;3;4;5] 0 ;;
<mlbot> - : int = 15
<Alpounet> > “1″ + 1 ;;
<mlbot> Type Error
<Yoric[DT]> > ” *_o/* MLBot, c’est cool, *\\o_*”;;
<mlbot> - : string = ” *_o/* MLBot, c’est cool, *\\o_*”

For the moment, mlbot is only on the following channels, still on Freenode : #ocaml-fr and #mlbot, but will be soon on #ocaml when I’ll have finished some security improvements.

By the way, my Jane Street Summer Project application has been sent this morning, after many discussions with many people of the OCaml community that have helped and encouraged me : David Teller, Jon Harrop, Xavier Leroy and my computability professor, Grégory Lafitte.
This project will be about HLVM (http://hlvm.forge.ocamlcore.org/) and the OCaml language. Stay tuned !