[Caml-list] OCaml IDEs for beginners?

["Benjamin C. Pierce" <bcpierce@saul.cis.upenn.edu>]

Are there any programming environments out there for OCaml that are
especially well suited to beginning programmers?

At the University of Pennsylvania, we teach our intro programming course
for CS majors in OCaml (and later Java).  At the moment, we are using
Emacs (with tuareg mode) as the "programming environment," but we're not
very happy with it -- there's too much (dangerous) power, and all the
control-F stuff is unintuitive for kids that have been raised on MS
Word.  Teaching programming to beginners is hard enough without turning
editing into a big deal.

One obvious improvement would be to build an Emacs mode that hides almost
all of its power and offers Word-like mouse- and keybindings.  This would
be pretty easy.

But even better would be a *real* IDE for beginners.  (After all, the
Scheme community has the very wonderful DrScheme environment...)  Is
there one?  

Or, if not, would there be interest in the community in creating one?

     Benjamin



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