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 AAA24153; Thu, 2 May 2002 00:57:07 +0200 (MET DST) X-Authentication-Warning: pauillac.inria.fr: majordomo set sender to owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr using -f Received: from nez-perce.inria.fr (nez-perce.inria.fr [192.93.2.78]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id AAA24148 for ; Thu, 2 May 2002 00:57:06 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from favie.faith.gr.jp (favie.faith.gr.jp [61.127.175.250]) by nez-perce.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.11.1) with ESMTP id g41Mv4D21175 for ; Thu, 2 May 2002 00:57:04 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from localhost (dhcp7.faith.gr.jp [192.168.1.17]) by favie.faith.gr.jp (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id HAA04543; Thu, 2 May 2002 07:56:53 +0900 To: bcpierce@cis.upenn.edu Cc: caml-list@inria.fr Subject: Re: [Caml-list] OCaml IDEs for beginners? In-Reply-To: <16362.1020253402@saul.cis.upenn.edu> References: <200205010824.RAA11802@v007.vaio.ne.jp> <16362.1020253402@saul.cis.upenn.edu> X-Mailer: Mew version 1.94.2 on Emacs 21.2 / Mule 5.0 (SAKAKI) Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: Text/Plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-Id: <20020502075651X.garrigue@kurims.kyoto-u.ac.jp> Date: Thu, 02 May 2002 07:56:51 +0900 From: Jacques Garrigue X-Dispatcher: imput version 20000228(IM140) Sender: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Precedence: bulk From: "Benjamin C. Pierce" > > > Are there any programming environments out there for OCaml that are > > > especially well suited to beginning programmers? > > > > how about ocamlbrowser? > > I'd wondered about this too. Does anybody have actual experience with > using OCamlBrowser as an IDE for teaching? (From playing around with it > for a few minutes, my sense is that it is "not quite there yet" for this > purpose, but perhaps it would not be that hard to get it there...) The browsing capabilities are certainly useful for middle-beginners, to get acquointed with the libraries. I have often done it with students here, and this works really well. Use of the editor and the shell may be good for real beginners too, but some improvements might help. You can already easily send a function from the editor to the shell (Alt-X), but there is no handling of shell errors. Yet, you can already typecheck stuff inside the editor, so you can make sure you never send wrong code. Type inspection should be a boon for beginners, but currently you get no information when there is a type error, and this would be really nice to have it. More generally the behaviour of the editor and he shell have some rough edges, which are hard to handle with Tk. This might be improved by moving to GTK 2 (not GTK 1.2, the text widget is too weak). As for working with subsets of the language, the answer, as always, seems to be camlp4. How easy is it to delete a rule from a grammar? Cheers, Jacques ------------------- 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