Re: ECB

[Kai Grossjohann <kai@emptydomain.de>]

Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org> writes:

>     Note that ECB works with CEDET which provides parsing of source
>     code.  This is a framework that has lots of potential for vastly
>     improving Emacs' support for different programming languages.
>
> Could you tell me more about CEDET?

The home page is cedet.sourceforge.net.  The name stands for
Collection of Emacs Development Environment Tools.  The tool that I
alluded to in my previous message was Semantic.

Semantic is a lexer, a parser generator, and also a parser.  It also
contains some tools to make use of the parsing results.  For example,
Semantic integrates with imenu to provide a better menu.  I think it
also integrates with eldoc to show function prototypes (function
signatures) for more languages.  And I already mentioned the
syntax-driven completion module.  There is also a component for
navigating the source code.  This one can navigate the source
according to syntactic constructs of the language:
forward-identifier, forward-statement, forward-block,
forward-method/subroutine/function/defun, forward-class, ...  There
is also a generalization of backward-up-list which groks statements,
block, classes etc.

My understanding is that the parsers generated by Semantic are
incremental, which is what you need for editing.

In addition to Semantic, there is also EDE which manages projects.
My understanding is that it can parse an AutoMake file and thus knows
which target a certain source file belongs to, so that it can offer
the right make target for compilation.  I guess it can do more that
is not immediately apparent.  There is also another module which can
write Makefiles for you, it appears to be useful for small projects.
Then people don't need to learn make or Autoconf.

Then there is COGRE for drawing diagrams.  It can create UML diagrams
from source code and display them, IIUC.

And then, CEDET contains libraries and utilities that are used for
implementing the other packages.

I hope that I have not misrepresented the CEDET functionality too
much.

>     I think that including CEDET in Emacs would enable various other
>     packages to take advantage of it.  For example, font-lock could
>     be improved by better parsing, as could syntactic indentation.
>     CEDET already provides syntax-driven completion: if x is a
>     struct, then completing after "x." completes the members of that
>     struct.
>
> What language is CEDET written in?

Emacs Lisp.

> What is its license?

GPL.

> How would we make Emacs talk with it?

Like any other Lisp package ;-)

> This could be a big step forward IF there is no horrible snag.

I agree totally.

Kai