# Foreword

- Conventions
- License
- Availability

This manual documents the release 3.12 of the OCaml system. It is organized as follows.

- Part I, “An introduction to OCaml”, gives an overview of the language.
- Part II, “The OCaml language”, is the reference description of the language.
- Part III, “The OCaml tools”, documents the compilers, toplevel system, and programming utilities.
- Part IV, “The OCaml library”, describes the modules provided in the standard library.

## Conventions

OCaml runs on several operating systems. The parts of this manual that are specific to one operating system are presented as shown below:

> Unix: This is material specific to the Unix family of operating systems, including Linux and MacOS X.

> Windows: This is material specific to Microsoft Windows (2000, XP, Vista).

## License

The OCaml system is copyright © 1996–2011 Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA). INRIA holds all ownership rights to the OCaml system.

The OCaml system is open source and can be freely redistributed. See the file `LICENSE` in the distribution for licensing information.

The present documentation is copyright © 2008 Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA). The OCaml documentation and user’s manual may be reproduced and distributed in whole or in part, subject to the following conditions:

- The copyright notice above and this permission notice must be preserved complete on all complete or partial copies.
- Any translation or derivative work of the OCaml documentation and user’s manual must be approved by the authors in writing before distribution.
- If you distribute the OCaml documentation and user’s manual in part, instructions for obtaining the complete version of this manual must be included, and a means for obtaining a complete version provided.
- Small portions may be reproduced as illustrations for reviews or quotes in other works without this permission notice if proper citation is given.

## Availability

The complete OCaml distribution can be accessed via the `http://caml.inria.fr/`Caml Web site. The `http://caml.inria.fr/`Caml Web site contains a lot of additional information on OCaml.