Re: introspection in SML

michele.simionato@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Dec 12, 2:10 pm, Jon Harrop <use...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:>
I don't think that is debateable at all in the context of mainstream
software development, i.e. web, database and GUI application programming.
Visual Studio features drag and drop designers for GUI and active web
pages and automatically binds your database to your GUI. What does Emacs
offer?

I see, you are talking about GUI designers.

That is part of it. When I'm developing multithreaded F# programs, I can use
Visual Studio's ordinary debugger to pause and examine the run-time down to
each thread, each source code position, any exceptions raised and so forth.
Nothing available for any other ML comes close to that level of
functionality.

IMHO, the single weakest point of SML and OCaml is their FFIs and,
consequently, the libraries that are available for them. OCaml is better
off than any SML implementation but it has been a real uphill struggle
taking far more effort than it should simply because the implementors of
OCaml don't care about FFI. Some SML implementations have better FFIs but
they all have a fraction as many users, so anything you find in SML is
basically untested code and is highly likely to not work (or even compile)
as a consequence.

I have never used one
(actually I have never written any professional quality GUI program)
so I will pass on that. For the rest, I agree that many people
dislike Emacs and find more convenient a conventional IDE as
VisualStudio or Eclipse, so it would probably be useful
to have one in order to popularize (S)ML. It would not be
my first priority, though.

I think MLs are much better suited to technical computing, so I'd be
inclined to build an IDE that was more like Mathematica than Visual Studio.

--
Dr Jon D Harrop, Flying Frog Consultancy Ltd.
http://www.ffconsultancy.com/products/?u
.

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