Re: History of code completion

Lex Spoon <lex@cc.gatech.edu> writes:
>
> The other style is to leave the programmer with a general text editor,
> and then have the editor maintain a parse tree for what the user has
> typed -- essentially compiling while the user types.


I'm currently working on something for (X)Emacs that does this in a
better fashion than the current syntax highlighters do (the current
syntax highlighters basically work on regular expressions and don't
actually offer symbol completion).


I have yet to try it out (I'm still pondering a couple design
decisions related to C), but instead of keeping track of everything
all the time, you can simplify it immensely if you just parse the
input every time a completion is requested. You still need error
recovery, of course, because you have no idea what the input might be.


Admittedly, this is somewhat wasteful, but if parsing speeds are
acceptable, the system wouldn't be all that bad (as far as I can tell,
based on what I know). If speeds are not quite up to par, you can
either force the programmer to manually force a parse or cache some
information and not get all the symbols every time. Acceptable
losses, I suppose, but I guess I'll have to find out.


--
Geoff(rey) Wozniak, Limited Duties Instructor
University of Western Ontario
Computer Science Department
London, Ontario, Canada
http://woz.killdash9.org/


GPG Key: http://woz.killdash9.org/misc/woz.gpg

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