OCaml ( ), originally known as Objective Caml, is the main implementation of the Caml programming language, created by Xavier Leroy, J”r”me Vouillon, Damien Doligez, Didier R”my and others in 1996. OCaml extends the core Caml language with object-oriented constructs. OCaml’s toolset includes an interactive top level interpreter, a bytecode compiler, and an optimizing native code compiler. It has a large standard library that makes it useful for many of the same applications as Python or Perl, as well as robust modular and object-oriented programming constructs that make it applicable for large-scale software engineering. OCaml is the successor to Caml Light. The acronym CAML originally stood for Categorical Abstract Machine Language, although OCaml abandons this abstract machine. OCaml is a free open source project managed and principally maintained by INRIA. In recent years, many new languages have drawn elements from OCaml, most notably F# and Scala.