It's more fair to say that F# originated as a heavily OCaml-influenced Caml implementation. It was originally called Caml.net [1], after all: "The early concep

It's more fair to say that F# originated as a heavily OCaml-influenced Caml implementation. It was originally called Caml.net [1], after all: "The early conception of F# was simple: to bring the benefits of OCaml to .NET and .NET to OCaml: a marriage between strongly typed functional programming and .NET. Here 'OCaml' meant both the core of the language itself, and the pragmatic approach to strongly-typed functional programming it represented. The initial task was relatively well-defined: the author would re-implement the core of the OCaml language and a portion of its base library to target the .NET Common Language Runtime. The implementation would be fresh, i.e. not using any of the OCaml codebase, for legal clarity. The first lines of the F# implementation were written in December 2001, a front-end for a re-implementation of the core Caml syntax targeting ILX as a back end, and thus to .NET. The initial compiler was written using OCaml." The initial version of F# was very much OCaml without functorial modules or object extensions. [1] https://fsharp.org/history/hopl-draft-1.pdf https://fsharp.org/history/hopl-draft-1.pdf