Re: Nit-picking

[Alan Mackenzie <acm@muc.de>]

Hi, Eli!

On Sat, Apr 12, 2008 at 11:40:13AM +0300, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
> > From: Richard Stallman <rms@gnu.org>

> > That is true, but it is also true that if we keep reopening
> > questions decided long ago, we will make our lives very difficult
> > and probably make little progress.  We have to leave well enough
> > alone for the old features most of the time, in order to have time
> > to add the new features we know we want.

> Amen.

> Perhaps it's just me, but there appear to be too many threads on this
> list that I need to skip entirely, due to their endless discussions of
> issues of miniscule importance.  OTOH, I don't remember any
> discussions of important new features for quite some time.  It almost
> looks like no important development is going on.

Down at CC Mode, I receive a constant trickle of "little" bugs, things
that go wrong in unusual (but perfectly reasonable) source code.
Languages like C++ and Java (and even C itself) are astonishingly
complicated.

In the medium future, I'll be concentrating on fixing long-standing,
difficult bugs: font locking going wrong in the middle of a long struct
declaration (for lack of syntactic context); inadequate handling of
template/generic bracketing (by < and >) in C++/Java.  Also, somewhat
easier, things like making C-M-a go to the beginning of the real
function/class in C++, not the enclosing outermost class or namespace;
and somebody asked me for a command to switch between C-style (/* .. */)
and C++-style (// .... \n) comments.  :-)

I've got vague ideas for adding "decluttering" commands: commands to
render things like casts and "frivolous compound statements" (where a
brace block contains only a single statement) invisible.  These are a
real eyesore in certain types of proprietary source code.  :-(

And there's continual refactoring to be done - software this
complicated, more than a decade old, doesn't stay cleanly implemented
all by itself.

All in all, nothing very exciting or earth shattering - but important,
nevertheless.

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Nuremberg, Germany).