From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from majordomo@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id JAA25403; Wed, 4 Feb 2004 09:32:40 +0100 (MET) X-Authentication-Warning: pauillac.inria.fr: majordomo set sender to owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr using -f Received: from concorde.inria.fr (concorde.inria.fr [192.93.2.39]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id JAA25967 for ; Wed, 4 Feb 2004 09:32:39 +0100 (MET) Received: from lri.lri.fr (lri.lri.fr [129.175.15.1]) by concorde.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.11.1) with ESMTP id i148WcP12245 for ; Wed, 4 Feb 2004 09:32:38 +0100 (MET) Received: from pc8-123 (pc8-123 [129.175.8.123]) by lri.lri.fr (8.12.10/jtpda-5.4) with ESMTP id i148IbUV024216 ; Wed, 4 Feb 2004 09:18:38 +0100 (MET) Received: from filliatr by pc8-123 with local (Exim 3.35 #1 (Debian)) id 1AoIF3-0007TQ-00; Wed, 04 Feb 2004 09:18:37 +0100 From: Jean-Christophe Filliatre MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <16416.43741.584621.112229@gargle.gargle.HOWL> Date: Wed, 4 Feb 2004 09:18:37 +0100 To: Cc: Subject: Re: [Caml-list] How useful do you find the OCaml debugger? In-Reply-To: References: X-Mailer: VM 7.03 under Emacs 20.7.2 Reply-To: Jean-Christophe.Filliatre@lri.fr (Jean-Christophe Filliatre) X-MailScanner: Found to be clean X-Loop: caml-list@inria.fr X-Spam: no; 0.00; filliatre:01 filliatre:01 lri:01 caml-list:01 debugger:01 donna:99 advisor:99 debuggers:01 debugger:01 compiles:01 recursively:01 mli:01 debugging:01 abstraction:01 ocaml:01 Sender: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Precedence: bulk donna+spam@cs.cmu.edu writes: > > My advisor and I were having a dicussion about the utility of debuggers for > functional langugages. He was of the opinion that they are not very useful > at all (for a functional language), and wondered if anyone even uses, for > instance, the OCaml debugger. Based on google-ing I have done, it looks like > it *is* used, but it's hard to get a good impression from just a web crawl. > So: > > - Do you personally find the OCaml debugger useful? > > - Is there any sort of general opinion in the OCaml community about the > debugger? I agree: the ocaml debugger is not very useful because usually if your ocaml code compiles it is correct :-) I've used the ocaml debugger a few times, however, and it is quite nice. Navigating in the source under Emacs and the ability to go backward is really great. I never spent more than a few minutes inside the debugger. The ocaml debugger also has a few drawbacks. Code for pretty-printers have to be loaded as a separate code and this is a pain: the ocaml debugger tries to load all the needed modules recursively but often fails doing so (because there is a .mli without a .ml, a module hidden into some library, etc.) It would be much more easy to use pretty-printers from the code you're debugging, even if the debugger has to load it twice, since you usually have some pretty-printers for your abstract data types. It would be even more useful if the debugger could print the values in abstract data types (we don't need abstraction anymore, we are in the debugger). My impression is that the ocaml debugger is not fully debugged, probably because the ocaml team, as most of us, does not need a debugger at all :-) -- Jean-Christophe ------------------- To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/ Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners