Re: [Caml-list] Inspect and dump values on the OCaml heap

[Martin Jambon <martin.jambon@ens-lyon.org>]

Kaustuv Chaudhuri wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 14, 2010 at 5:02 PM, Kaspar Rohrer <kaspar.rohrer@gmail.com> wrote:
>> [...]
> 
> Implementing dumpers seems like a teething procedure for
> OCaml hackers. Here's my own attempt from a couple of years ago.
> It handles cycles, renders SVGs (via Graphviz), and can accept
> data structure "descriptions" to produce better names for the
> internal nodes. It is almost 100% OCaml.
> 
>   http://www.lix.polytechnique.fr/~kaustuv/misc/ocaml_show.html
> 
> I am convinced that such things have *no* usefulness. If you
> are trying to debug your data structure, state its global
> invariants, prove (at whatever level of formality you are most
> comfortable with) that all API functions preserve the invariants,
> and use the module system to hide functions that do not
> preserve them. You will be done faster than trying to make
> sense of graphs and your code will be better.

The only reason why I wrote Dum was to print exceptions deeper than
Printexc.to_string:

# exception Foo of [`Bar of string];;
exception Foo of [ `Bar of string ]

# Printexc.to_string (Foo (`Bar "abc"));;
- : string = "Foo(_)"

# Dum.to_string (Foo (`Bar "abc"));;
- : string = "((\"Foo\") (3303859 \"abc\"))"


Martin

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