Re: Is intellisense features integration in Emacs technically possible?

[phillip.lord@newcastle.ac.uk (Phillip Lord)]

"Eric M. Ludlam" <eric@siege-engine.com> writes:
>> I think that it depends on the language. Introspecting over, for
>> example, Java would require an awful of elisp, which would be difficult
>> to write. Getting Java to do this work is quite a lot less effort.
>> Hence, the JDEEs use of Java for this (via bsh). Likewise, Clojure and
>> Scala both of which use their own language to do much of the work. Or
>> for that matter, common lisp with slime/swank. Or even, for that matter,
>> English with aspell. I didn't have a problem with responsiveness with
>> any of these.
>
> I don't think it is a good idea to consider the problem of doing smart
> completion in Emacs as "Emacs Lisp VS External library".  It is much more
> advantageous to figure out what each is best at and do that instead.


> I think it would be better to have a strong mix between the two.  I am of
> course a bit biased since I've put support for this in CEDET quite a while
> ago.  The premise for those who haven't studied how the smart completion
> engine in CEDET works is pretty simple.  Emacs is in charge of basic buffer
> parsing.  As David explained, it is a simple tagging parser, but unlike
> etags/ctags, it collects much more detailed information.   It also has a local
> context parser, allowing it to find local variables, and identify the kind of
> command the cursor is sitting on, such as an assignment, struct dereferences,
> etc.


I would agree with this, I think. JDEEs use of CEDET and introspection
worked quite nicely together. Combined with (yet another) analysis step
for fontification.

My main point was to argue that an all elisp solution isn't necessarily
sensible. To use a (strained) example in an English buffer
`forward-word' is always going to be best implemented in elisp, while
having "spell-check" in aspell seems reasonable.

Phil