From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Received: (from majordomo@localhost) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) id OAA31138; Fri, 3 May 2002 14:24:45 +0200 (MET DST) X-Authentication-Warning: pauillac.inria.fr: majordomo set sender to owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr using -f Received: from concorde.inria.fr (concorde.inria.fr [192.93.2.39]) by pauillac.inria.fr (8.7.6/8.7.3) with ESMTP id OAA31131 for ; Fri, 3 May 2002 14:24:44 +0200 (MET DST) Received: from exchange.cs.cornell.edu (exchange.cs.cornell.edu [128.84.97.8]) by concorde.inria.fr (8.11.1/8.11.1) with ESMTP id g43COiX08937 for ; Fri, 3 May 2002 14:24:44 +0200 (MET DST) content-class: urn:content-classes:message MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable Subject: RE: [Caml-list] OCaml IDEs for beginners? X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft Exchange V6.0.5762.3 Date: Fri, 3 May 2002 08:24:43 -0400 Message-ID: <706871B20764CD449DB0E8E3D81C4D4301EE6D30@opus.cs.cornell.edu> Thread-Topic: [Caml-list] OCaml IDEs for beginners? Thread-Index: AcHxyzniKXrEGulOSjansSWnnu+nNgAw/WZwAAMZDPA= From: "Gregory Morrisett" To: "Gregory Morrisett" , , "Jacques Garrigue" Cc: Sender: owner-caml-list@pauillac.inria.fr Precedence: bulk On another note, last time I talked to Matthias, Shriram, and/or Matthew, they were talking about putting a "DrML" environment=20 together. I'm not sure whether they were shooting for an SML or Ocaml environment. =20 I actually think there's a lot more to putting together a good=20 teaching IDE together (like DrScheme) than what people currently have or could easily cobble together. For instance, an integrated algebraic stepper (for at least the functional subset of the language) is really a nice thing to have. Similarly, it would be nice to have an environment browser which allows you to look through the top-level environment to search for library bindings, see module signatures, etc. =20 Another thing that would be really nice is to have incremental type checking integrated with the editor so that, for instance, you could mouse over an identifier or expression and get its type. And of course, any improvement in type error messages as well as parse errors. The latter is really problematic with Ocaml's syntax (old or revised). =20 It might also be nice to have a pretty-printer which can put code into a somewhat canonical style. For instance, I require students to put types on top-level definitions and have certain layout requirements. It would be nice if there were a layout checker. And of course, this all needs to be modifiable for an instructor so that they can turn on/off features in language levels. =20 -Greg ------------------- To unsubscribe, mail caml-list-request@inria.fr Archives: http://caml.inria.fr Bug reports: http://caml.inria.fr/bin/caml-bugs FAQ: http://caml.inria.fr/FAQ/ Beginner's list: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ocaml_beginners