On Tue, Feb 03, 2004 at 11:31:33PM -0500, 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.

Sounds like your advisor never had a real job :-)

Debuggers are very useful indeed for tracking down logic bugs in real
world (ie. large, convoluted, badly written) programs.

I've found ocamldebug to be very painful to use, compared to, say,
gdb.  That's when it works at all.  For reasons I don't really
understand I've found that ocamldebug doesn't work very reliably,
often showing the wrong line numbers or losing the connection to the
debugged process.

One of the features I'd really like to see for ocaml would be proper
support for stabs / gdb.  At the moment I'm mainly relying on
inserting eprintf / prerr_endline into the code.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones. http://www.annexia.org/ http://www.j-london.com/
Merjis Ltd. http://www.merjis.com/ - improving website return on investment
If I have not seen as far as others, it is because I have been
standing in the footprints of giants.  -- from Usenet

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