Re: Smart textual editors

What really bugs me about this conversation is that, more than ten years ago
now, I used a demo version of a Pascal syntax-directed editor called
MaryJane on crummy old DOS 3.something. It did everything you want except,
of course, the data-flow analysis. It had a built-in interpreter, drop-down
templates for control-flow statements and declarations, and it was fast,
responding in real-time to your keystrokes, telling you about syntax errors
and suggesting fixes, warning you about undeclared variables, could direct
you to the source of run-time errors, etc. When you were as done as you
wanted to be, you could export an ASCII file of your code suitable for
compilation.


So...One generation of computing technology later, we can't do the same
thing for C, a slightly more complex language? What's the problem here?
Nick G.
[Some of the integrated C environments do that sort of thing. I'm still
not convinced it's useful other than to the most inexperienced programmers.
-John]


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