Re: [Caml-list] Teaching ocaml programming

[Brighten Godfrey <pbg@cs.berkeley.edu>]

Depending on how flexible you are, nedit + shell might be a workable  
choice.  It is a clean, intuitive, but sufficiently powerful editor.   
Emacs always left me annoyed.

I use, on a daily basis, a small script which acts as a front-end to  
`make' and automatically points you to the error in the code in  
nedit, highlighting the characters that the ocaml compiler complains  
about.  It uses the existing nedit window if you have the file open  
already, or else opens it for you.  The script also works with gcc  
instead of ocaml, and (though I can't vouch for it much) gvim instead  
of nedit.  So my typical development environment consists of nedit  
and a shell in which I compile via the script.

If anyone is interested, I'd be happy to share this.

I guess the main question would be integrating the toplevel with  
nedit.  I imagine there are a number of ways to do this, depending on  
your needs.  You might be able to put something together using  
nedit's scripting language, or just do something entirely external to  
the editor.

~Brighten

On Sep 26, 2008, at 4:30 AM, Andrej Bauer wrote:

> Once again I am teaching a course on theory of programming  
> languages in which we will use ocaml to implement mini-languages.  
> And once again I face the question: which programming environment  
> should we use?
>
> I have so far tried to use (under Windows)
> 1. cygwin + ocaml + XEmacs
> 2. Eclipse + OcaIDE
>
> The second solution worked better than the first, for the simple  
> reason that XEmacs is a complete mystery to students. They really,  
> really hate it. But even with the second soltion we had a lot of  
> trouble, because Eclipse is really complicated, and OcaIDE is sort  
> of experimental and not so good under Windows, so the whole setup  
> was confusing and fragile.
>
> The requirements are very simple:
> 1. easy access to toplevel (with line-editing)
> 2. editor which can send stuff to toplevel, points to errors in  
> source code, and is not Emacs.
>
> Any ideas what to do? We have dual-boot machines (Windows + Ubuntu).
>
> Best regards,
>
> Andrej