Debugging haskell

Malcolm Wallace Malcolm.Wallace@cs.york.ac.uk
Mon, 24 Feb 2003 11:24:43 +0000


Joe English <jenglish@flightlab.com> writes:

> Me either; in fact even 1/4 of the time debugging
> sounds quite high.
> 
> When I first started using Haskell, most of my time
> went to fighting with the typechecker, but once the
> code checked it almost always Just Worked.  This is a
> pleasant experience.

But surely "fighting the typechecker" is exactly a debugging activity.
The great benefits are that you remove the bugs before even running
the code, and you are finding specification errors in addition to
mere implementation errors.

>From this point of view, I would say that the amount of time spent
debugging in Haskell can actually still be quite high, but the time
is spent more effectively, because the compiler directs you straight
to the bugs, instead of you having to find them yourself.

Regards,
    Malcolm