Caml (originally an acronym for Categorical Abstract Machine Language) is a multi-paradigm, general-purpose, high-level, functional programming language which is a dialect of the ML programming language family. Caml was developed in France at French Institute for Research in Computer Science and Automation (INRIA) and École normale supérieure (Paris) (ENS).

Caml is statically typed, strictly evaluated, and uses automatic memory management. OCaml, the main descendant of Caml, adds many features to the language, including an object-oriented programming (object) layer.

In the following, # represents the Caml prompt.

A "Hello, World!" program is:

Many mathematical functions, such as factorial, are most naturally represented in a purely functional form. The following recursive, purely functional Caml function implements factorial:

The function can be written equivalently using pattern matching:

This latter form is the mathematical definition of factorial as a recurrence relation.

Note that the compiler inferred the type of this function to be int -> int, meaning that this function maps ints onto ints. For example, 12! is: