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

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