On Wednesday 19 December 2007 06:04 pm, Thorsten Haude wrote:
> * Randy Kramer wrote (2007-12-18 11:56):
> >I guess the question that always comes up (in my mind) for something like
this
> >is how to present it--e.g., as a separate document, as comments in the
code,
> >perhaps combined as some sort of literate programming document, or ...
>
> Comments can only go this far. Some things are better explained from
> high above,
Thorston,
Good, I'm glad to find somebody that thinks that way--too often I hear of
self-documenting code.
> and comments like this might actually distract. (Example:
> I just converted doSave() into Ruby, just to understand it better.
> Most people would simply scratch their heads at the sight of a Ruby
> block in file.c.)
> There are a lot of functions and smaller sections of code which are
> largely uncommented, so you can add a *lot* of words before becoming
> a nuisance.
I'll consider doing that, but I don't feel very confident in my abilities in C
(as I am still attempting to learn)--if I get to the point of thinking about
committing any comments, I'll probably post to the list first to get comments
(on the comments).
> >PS: My overall goal, should I ever get that far, is to add (real) folding
to
> >nedit. At some point I want to start a discussion on the list about the
best
> >approach to doing that, but I'm not quite ready for that.
>
> Folding is the only feature I put on the (sadly ignored) Roadmap;
> a smart folding implementation is one the features I miss most.
>
>
> However, you read the list for some time now, so you can guess that I
> would prefer work on some bugs and larger architectural issues before
> adding a feature bound to be as big as this.
I have no objection to something like that happening, but I have doubts that
I'll be the guy to do that or even be heavily involved in such a task. Now
that I've started looking at the code by skimming each .h and .c file (as
opposed to the attempt I made a few years ago where I tried to look at main{}
and then sort of trace everything from there) the code doesn't look all that
bad to me.
Of course, I'm a newbie to C, X, and nedit development, so I'm not really in a
position to judge. Clearly there's a lot I don't understand, but I don't see
things that seem really dumb to me.
I guess the things that do bother me are the problems I can see from the user
viewpoint--the strange way macros have to be stored in a file, use of the X
configuration files (but maybe that's just the *nix way and I have a way to
go before I fully accept/adopt that approach), and similar stuff.
I'm guessing that if somebody else works on cleaning up the code and spends 5
years doing it, by that time I *might* be ready to implement folding. ;-)
(I'd hope to do better than that, but lots of things work against
that--everything takes longer than I expect, real life interferes, ...)
regards,
Randy Kramer
--
NEdit Develop mailing list - [email protected]
http://www.nedit.org/mailman/listinfo/develop
