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 RAA13710; Wed, 4 Feb 2004 17:45:27 +0100 (MET) 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 RAA13852 for ; Wed, 4 Feb 2004 17:45:25 +0100 (MET) Received: from clusterb2.tfb.com (clusterb2.tfb.com [65.126.210.71]) by nez-perce.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.11.1) with ESMTP id i14GjOv00945 for ; Wed, 4 Feb 2004 17:45:24 +0100 (MET) Received: from tfb.com (host-66-81-196-105.rev.o1.com [66.81.196.105]) by clusterb2.tfb.com (8.12.5/8.12.5) with ESMTP id i14GjBPh029448; Wed, 4 Feb 2004 08:45:12 -0800 Message-ID: <40212193.30107@tfb.com> Date: Wed, 04 Feb 2004 08:45:07 -0800 From: Ken Rose Reply-To: rose@acm.org User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.4) Gecko/20030703 X-Accept-Language: en-us, en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: donna+spam@cs.cmu.edu CC: caml-list@inria.fr Subject: Re: [Caml-list] How useful do you find the OCaml debugger? References: In-Reply-To: Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Loop: caml-list@inria.fr X-Spam: no; 0.00; caml-list:01 debugger:01 donna:99 advisor:99 debuggers:01 debugger:01 assertion:01 trips:99 compiler:01 ocaml:01 ocaml:01 assertions:01 assert:02 wrote:03 functional:06 Sender: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Precedence: bulk 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. > So: > > - Do you personally find the OCaml debugger useful? My biggest ocaml program is a DSL compiler that's about 6000 lines long, and has been gradually written over the past 5 years or so. I've been pretty good about placing assertions in the code - particularly "assert(false)" in branches that I don't believe should be taken. This has been very helpful, because when the world proves my opinion wrong, which it often does, I can just run in the debugger until the assertion trips, and then back up until I see what happened to produce the situation I thought was impossible. - ken ------------------- 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