History of code completion

gswork@mailcity.com (gswork)
20 Oct 2001 21:41:24 -0400

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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)
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From: gswork@mailcity.com (gswork)
Newsgroups: comp.compilers,comp.programming
Date: 20 Oct 2001 21:41:24 -0400
Organization: http://groups.google.com/
Keywords: editor
Posted-Date: 20 Oct 2001 21:41:24 EDT

Like many developers I enjoy the addition of code completion (or
insight or intellisense etc) in an IDE. Jbuilder, Delphi, VB and
various other major IDE's have it.


The ability to see a list of possible members (properties & methods)
in OOP is valuable, especially in huge languages like Java. The
ability to see syntax & argument reminders is handy too - especially
where the programmer needs to (or wants to) use various tools. Back
in the days of Turbo C etc is was plausible to study and know all
commonly used library functions & syntactic requirements, and
reference a book for the rest. Nowadays, if you switch between 3 or 4
tools in the hugely extended languages we have it's nigh on
impossible, and the books these days have to be enormous!


So I'm quite interested in the history of code completion in IDE's &
code editors. Does anyone have any info or personal recollections,
or even opinions on the merits/demerits of code completion?


Thanks

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