OCaml IDE (working with the OCaml debugger)

["Nathaniel J. Gaylinn" <ngaylinn@cs.brown.edu>]

Although I've spent a good amount of time working with OCaml, I've never
really made much use of the debugger. However, I feel that having a nice
interface for the ocaml debugger is an important feature for my program to
have!

Still, there are two small issues of just using the debugger that I'm
having some problems with, and until I have a better handle on them I
can't do much to develop a GUI for the debugger.

To start with, I found the stepping pattern of ocamldebug to be rather
unintuitive. After playing with it for an afternoon, I feel I have a
pretty good handle on how OCaml steps through code, but I can't personally
put it into words. Is there a simple way to describe how OCaml steps
through source code? How come in a recursive function invocation that goes
from n = 0 to n = m does the debugger seem to only stop when n = 1 to m
and not when n = 0? If this isn't clear, I can post an example.

Secondly, I often find with simple programs that OCaml doesn't list any
events in the module my source code defines, even though the source code
contains recursive function definitons and calls! What is the minimum
required for ocamldebug to see events in a simple program?

Thanks,
  -- Nate Gaylinn