RE: [Caml-list] XEmacs or GNU Emacs?

["John Hughes" <jfh@cs.brown.edu>]

As I've mentioned, we use ML (or variants) in teaching the second half
of
a 3-month introduction to computer science. The first half is in
Scheme
(using DrScheme, which has a nice builtin editor/evaluator, so the
whole
issue of choosing an environment gets simple). 

This year we're going to use OCaml. That probably means teaching
them Emacs, but since many of them will work on WinXP platforms
at home (but use Linux while at school),
I'm not thrilled about using XEmacs (at least not in the mode
where it wants to fire up an X server on the windows box, etc.). 

So the setup I'm thinking of looks like this:

Ocaml 3.07: compiled from sources under Linux, 
            Cygwin port for XP, because we want to use the debugger

GNU Emacs + tuareg for both platforms

ocamldebug on both platforms

Two questions: 

* Does this sound reasonable to you experts? 

* Does anyone else out there wish that ml mode in Emacs had a "kill
the 
current ML process and restart a fresh one, and then evaluate my
buffer in that new, fresh, clean process?" 

Our students, when they first
learn about modules, get all screwed up by repeatedly evaluating a
module
description, and then finding that two objects that are apparently of 
type Foo cannot be assigned, compared, etc. (Under MOSML and SML/NJ,
this
issue led to some of the most cryptic error messages I've ever
encountered.)

I hacked this up in ML-mode a few years ago, and my students loved it.

If the rest of the world would actually benefit from it, I'll do it
again
in Tuareg mode and pass it back to the maintainers...

---John Hughes


> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr 
> [mailto:owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr] On Behalf Of Benjamin
Geer
> Sent: Monday, August 09, 2004 11:46 AM
> To: caml
> Subject: Re: [Caml-list] XEmacs or GNU Emacs?
> 
> Jérôme Marant wrote:
> >>A slight advantage might be that the XEmacs package 
> collection comes 
> >>with the O'Caml mode.
> > 
> > Which is very outdated and unmaitained.
> 
> I've been very happy with tuareg mode:
> 
> http://www-rocq.inria.fr/~acohen/tuareg/
> 
> Ben
> 
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