Re: Is intellisense features integration in Emacs technically possible?

[David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@xemacs.org> writes:

> Not as you put it.  However, David made a claim that highly factored
> design could make development slower, and I wanted to put that claim
> to rest

I think the usual way to get rid of strawmen is to burn them.

What I was talking about is that basically factoring the whole
look-and-feel into a unified display engine in XEmacs might have sped up
its initial spread across platforms but has had drawbacks in its
long-term popularity.  With one result being that it has not rallied
enough interest behind it to cover all basic desktop environments well
in _spite_ of the porting possibly being easier.

It may well be easier to provide the display engine support for
"Intellisense" on four different major platforms on XEmacs than on
Emacs.

> because it's *easy* to factor intellisense given Emacs's current
> architecture, and I want to argue that people shouldn't argue about
> how hard it is to do comprehensively.  They should just jump in and do
> the language and features *they* need and let others do what they want
> to do.  (Which I believe is your point, too!)

Emacs 21 started with a number of features only being available
under X11.  That's a viable starting point, and with its current
developers I consider it likely that the support for an interesting
feature would not remain stuck in that state for as long the overall
graphic display support did in the past.

At any rate, I doubt that the main stumbling block is the display
support.

>  > which is whether introducing intellisense for select languages is
>  > or isn't practically possible in Emacs development.

I lost context here, but in typical programming styles, R2L is mostly
relevant for comments.

-- 
David Kastrup