Re: Is intellisense features integration in Emacs technically possible?

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

Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> writes:
>> A better way is to build on the hard work of other and interface
>> emacs with an external tool.
>
> Personally, I think implementing such features via external programs
> is a terrible design.  It will never be smooth and responsive enough,
> and on top of that you'd need to track development of those other
> tools.  And what if they become abandoned some day?


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.



Phil