Re: History of code completion

Lex Spoon <lex@cc.gatech.edu> wrote:
>The second kind is still
>around. Teitelbaum et al started a company and turned their stuff
>into products. See http://www.grammatech.com/ -John]


The once very popular THINK Pascal compiler for the Macintosh also
worked in that fashion. The program text was parsed until the first
syntax error, after which text was rendered in outline font. Correct
text would be formatted nicely, with keywords in boldface. The
AppleScript editor also works mostly this way.


Having spent my teenage years hacking in COMPAS (which later became
Turbo) Pascal, I appreciate the combination of a fast compiler with
the simplicity of always only having to deal with the first occuring
syntax error. I still tend to program that way, and would love to have
a compiler that could work as a coroutine to for example vim. To this
day I still don't really understand why a compiler should waste time
trying to second-guess the programmer's intent after the first
occuring syntax error.


I have worked a bit with Sun's Forte for Java IDE, which also has
completion features - it works quite well.


-Lasse

Return to the comp.compilers page.
Search the comp.compilers archives again.