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 LAA04957; Wed, 4 Feb 2004 11:15:53 +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 LAA05078 for ; Wed, 4 Feb 2004 11:15:52 +0100 (MET) Received: from aomori.annexia.org (annexia.force9.co.uk [212.56.101.183]) by concorde.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.11.1) with ESMTP id i14AFpP18254 for ; Wed, 4 Feb 2004 11:15:51 +0100 (MET) Received: from rich by aomori.annexia.org with local (Exim 3.36 #1 (Debian)) id 1AoK4U-00007m-00 for ; Wed, 04 Feb 2004 10:15:50 +0000 Date: Wed, 4 Feb 2004 10:15:50 +0000 Cc: caml-list@inria.fr Subject: Re: [Caml-list] How useful do you find the OCaml debugger? Message-ID: <20040204101550.GA32187@redhat.com> References: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.4i From: Richard Jones X-Loop: caml-list@inria.fr X-Spam: no; 0.00; caml-list:01 debugger:01 2004:99 donna:99 advisor:99 debuggers:01 debugger:01 advisor:99 debuggers:01 convoluted:01 ocamldebug:01 gdb:01 ocamldebug:01 gdb:01 inserting:01 Sender: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Precedence: bulk On Tue, Feb 03, 2004 at 11:31:33PM -0500, donna+spam@cs.cmu.edu wrote: > Hello, > > 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. Sounds like your advisor never had a real job :-) Debuggers are very useful indeed for tracking down logic bugs in real world (ie. large, convoluted, badly written) programs. I've found ocamldebug to be very painful to use, compared to, say, gdb. That's when it works at all. For reasons I don't really understand I've found that ocamldebug doesn't work very reliably, often showing the wrong line numbers or losing the connection to the debugged process. One of the features I'd really like to see for ocaml would be proper support for stabs / gdb. At the moment I'm mainly relying on inserting eprintf / prerr_endline into the code. Rich. -- Richard Jones. http://www.annexia.org/ http://www.j-london.com/ Merjis Ltd. http://www.merjis.com/ - improving website return on investment If I have not seen as far as others, it is because I have been standing in the footprints of giants. -- from Usenet ------------------- 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