Re: [Caml-list] Teaching ocaml programming

[Kuba Ober <kuba@mareimbrium.org>]

On Friday 26 September 2008, Andrej Bauer wrote:
> Once again I am teaching a course on theory of programming languages in
> which we will use ocaml to implement mini-languages. And once again I
> face the question: which programming environment should we use?
>
> I have so far tried to use (under Windows)
> 1. cygwin + ocaml + XEmacs
> 2. Eclipse + OcaIDE
>
> The second solution worked better than the first, for the simple reason
> that XEmacs is a complete mystery to students. They really, really hate
> it. But even with the second soltion we had a lot of trouble, because
> Eclipse is really complicated, and OcaIDE is sort of experimental and
> not so good under Windows, so the whole setup was confusing and fragile.
>
> The requirements are very simple:
> 1. easy access to toplevel (with line-editing)
> 2. editor which can send stuff to toplevel, points to errors in source
> code, and is not Emacs.

I've been reading through this thread and it all seems like a 300-liner
in Qt/C++ (yes, it's that powerful) (excluding syntax definition for Qt's
editor widget, if one doesn't exist somewhere for grabs).
Is there a non-Cygwin (mingw?) version of Ocaml for Windows that's "good
enough" for you? If so, I will tackle it over the weekend. My numerical
methods prof was looking for something like that too. Just give me
a pointer to a non-Cygwin version of Ocaml that works for you; I refuse
to deal with anything that has "Cygwin" in it :)

Cheers, Kuba