Re: What IDE features do we need?

[Thomas Lord <lord@emf.net>]

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Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>>
>> Refactoring requires a lot more infrastructure than what etags and
>> ebrowse provide.
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> I'm not convinced, but I won't argue.
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The tools that people are excited about differ from etags and ebrowse by 
virtue of their incremental nature (updating the databases as the code 
is modified) and precision.    The precision aspect is mainly a Java 
thing since the simple (enough) scoping rules and absence of syntactic 
abstraction make incremental parsing tractable.  

If you were to argue and you argued that the actual software engineering 
practice of refactoring and other correctness-preserving global 
transforms doesn't need such heavy guns, and is very well-served by more 
simply text based tools like Emacs has, etc:  well, you'd get no 
argument back from me.

But, afaict from watching people in various communities talk about it, 
Eclipse's Java features have basically /taught/ the utility of global 
transforms to many programmers.   So many people tend to be excited 
about the Eclipse approach and to assume that that's how things are 
supposed to work.



-t






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