Re: New editor/Integrated Development Environment/compiler

> Of course, we know that unix is the ultimate Integrated Development
> Environment. But some people don't like unix (there are arguments,
> see one below), and want something even more "integrated", ie. in a
> single application. Never mind that applications or systems are all
> the same: they're virtual machines.
>
Totally agreed!


> There's no need for files, each function or method can be compiled
> separately. This helps greatly while developing because instead of
> having a edit-save-compile-debug-loop, you can use a
> read-eval-print-loop, with feedback at a much finer grain.


This is exactly one of the advantages of working with the structure,
Isn't it a waste of resources the possibility to write a program with
wrong syntax? Shouldn't be much easier to validate and restrict the
typed text as the user types, and even restructure the binary product
immediately? No need of compilation stage, that's pure waste of time and
resources, from my point of view.


> As for the proprietary format, I entirely agree. We want to be able to
> exchange our programs, possibly on different systems. That's why there
> are features such as the fileOut: and fileIn: methods in Smalltalk (and
> equivalent in InterLisp, see the reference provided), to serialize or
> deserialize the code into ASCII for interchange.
I think that it should be possible to create a standard-representation
of symbols, like an international table, similar to ascii.


> So remember, we're not in the context of the unix IDE, with tools such
> as vim, gcc, git and tag, but in the context of a different system, with
> a different granularity of integration, and where the tools can work
> directly with the data objects that represent the programs, instead of
> having to serialize/deserialize constantly meaningless ASCII streams.
Yep, absolutely.


[I think I'll bring this thread to a close now. Structure editors are
not new -- there were lots of them in the 1970s and 1980s, and they
all died for reasons unrelated to lack of broadband connections. You
can find many papers written on them (not neccessarily all available
for free online), and I really think anyone planning to go down that
road should start by learning about all the sinkholes that smart
people ran into before. -John]

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