F# is derived from OCaml, but what major items are missing or added? Specifically I'm curious as to whether the resources available for learning OCaml are also useful to someone who wants to learn F#.
This question has been answered for some time now, but I was quite surprised that most of the answers say what OCaml features are missing in F# - this is definitely good to know if you want to port existing OCaml programs to F# (which is probably the motivation of most of the referenced articles). However, there are many features that make F# a different language (not just a limited version of OCaml for .NET!) Here is a couple of things that are added in F#:
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for all numeric types as well as your types that support it.And, honestly, I think that it is also worth mentioning the Visual Studio IDE. This is not a part of the language, but it really improves the user experience (IntelliSense support in Visual Studio is really good!)
If you look at the list, there are many things that largely contributed to the popularity of F#, so it's much more than just "OCaml without functors". F# is definitely based on OCaml (and takes ideas from other languages such as Haskell) and shares many aspects with them, however there is also a lot of other things. I guess that without things like asynchronous workflows, .NET style OO and meta-programming, the Microsoft Developer Division would never include F# in Visual Studio 2010.