# Notes (OFVB 05/31): Sorting Things

see sort.ml

Okay, so a couple things here. First, it looks like OCaml scopes everything after its declaration, so expressions can only call expressions declared above itself. This is annoying, but is partially fixable by declaring auxilliary functions with a let-and block.

Secondly, the ocaml repl is not very user friendly. No arrow keys, no command history. We could solve this with rlwrap, which is a general tool for adding line editing features to a program, but I like to keep things in-ecosystem as much as possible, so we’ll use utop.

But, since this is NixOS, I don’t want to pollute my global environment with nix-env -iA nixos.ocamlPackages.utop, instead I want to use a nix-shell. My default.nix:

with import <nixpkgs> {};
stdenv.mkDerivation rec {
name = "ocamlProject";
src = null;
buildInputs = with ocamlPackages;
[ ocaml
opam
utop
];
}

# Questions

see sort.ml

## 2

I have modified take and drop to never fail, since they now take and drop greedily, i.e. take 5 [] returns [], which makes take 6 [1] return [1]

## 3

Just requires flipping the <= to a >=.

## 5

Lists are sorted in “alphabetic word order”, which is characterwise comparison where the leading entry is most determinant, e.g. [1; _ ] < [2; _].