Re: History of code completion

Marco van de Voort <marcov@toad.stack.nl>
5 Nov 2001 00:03:04 -0500

          From comp.compilers

Related articles
History of code completion gswork@mailcity.com (2001-10-20)
Re: History of code completion lex@cc.gatech.edu (Lex Spoon) (2001-10-21)
Re: History of code completion neelk@alum.mit.edu (2001-10-23)
Re: History of code completion jsgray@acm.org (Jan Gray) (2001-10-23)
Re: History of code completion lhp+news@toft-hp.dk (2001-10-23)
Re: History of code completion gzw@home.com (Geoff Wozniak) (2001-10-27)
Re: History of code completion marcov@toad.stack.nl (Marco van de Voort) (2001-11-05)
Re: History of code completion genew@mail.ocis.net (2001-11-08)
Re: History of code completion binary@eton.powernet.co.uk (Richard Heathfield) (2001-11-08)
Re: History of code completion lex@cc.gatech.edu (Lex Spoon) (2001-11-08)
Re: History of code completion neelk@alum.mit.edu (2001-11-11)
Re: History of code completion rbates@southwind.net (Rodney M. Bates) (2001-11-11)
Re: History of code completion joachim_d@gmx.de (Joachim Durchholz) (2001-11-14)
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From: Marco van de Voort <marcov@toad.stack.nl>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers,comp.programming
Date: 5 Nov 2001 00:03:04 -0500
Organization: Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands
References: 01-10-091 01-10-112
Keywords: history, editor
Posted-Date: 05 Nov 2001 00:03:04 EST

Lex Spoon wrote:


[history of code completion]


> In either style, note that you *have* to have a language-specific
> editor or editor mode for this kind of tool to work. For it to work
> well, you furthermore need the editor to be integrated with the
> compiler (or at least, the editor needs to know about the compiled
> codebase.) For some reason, there is a lot of resistance to such
> integrated development environments, partially because they tend to
> not cooperate well with other languages.


I think that resistance is something from the C crowd. E.g. Pascal
(Delphi, Turbo Pascal) has been doing this for quite a long while now.


> In my more cynical moments, I sometimes wonder if software-development
> tools are driven by a desire to make programming remain "fun". What a
> crazy bunch we are!
>
> -Lex
> [I've used both kinds of editors. The first kind is incredibly
> annoying, because there are lots of common and simple text changes
> that are large changes in the parse tree, e.g, move a close brace
> down a few lines past some other statements. The second kind is still
> around. Teitelbaum et al started a company and turned their stuff
> into products. See http://www.grammatech.com/ -John]


I somehow have the feeling that this is the same battle as an entirely
free form texteditor vs something with modes like VI.


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