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.
> So:
> 
> - Do you personally find the OCaml debugger useful?

Yes, definitely.  The ability to run programs in reverse is especially
useful.  Using it, I removed a bunch of bugs from my Delaunay
triangulator yesterday.  It would have been much harder to find the
problems some other way.

That said, the debugger would be even better if it had conditional
breakpoints, the ability to change variable values, and the ability to
call functions.  

-- 
Issac Trotts
http://redwood.ucdavis.edu/~issac

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