I know its a pain, but so is having to deal with spaces and tabs. How about telling the editor to convert tabs to spaces when entering text? Better than leaving tabs in there.
Robert On Jun 29, 2010 12:52 PM, "B Smith-Mannschott" <[email protected]> wrote: On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 17:08, Robert Casto <[email protected]> wrote: > Can't we just move on ... A few (fairly random) thoughts: Wirth's Oberon system supplied a rich text editor with fonts/styles and embedded images. All source was written in this editor, giving one the option of embedding images in comments, choosing tab stops etc. Later iterations ("Oberon System 3") also provided a compound-document based GUI ("Gadgets"). But, alas while you could embed images and indeed arbitrary chunks of GUI into your source code, say for documentation, all this was ignored by the compiler. It'd have been cool if you could have said something like: myGui := [ actual, live functioning GUI embedded in source right here ] myGui.doSomething; "cool", but not really useful since Oberon's approach to GUI was such that this kind of code-driven GUI programming was unheard of. The GUI was a document you created interactively, it was not something you wrote a boat-load of ugly unmaintainable code to produce (a'la Swing). Didn't IBM's Visual Age (for Smalltalk, later for Java, a fore-runner of Eclipse) store project source in some kind of a database? Didn't that suck? Sure, you could store augmented parse trees in place of source, but diff/merge of tree-like structures is monumentally more difficult than diff/merge of textual lines (which is nothing more than a flat sequence). Witness, for example, the memory consumption of XML-aware diff tools. Witness how few of them exist. There has been quite a bit of research on structured editors: i.e. editors where you manipulate your program at the level of the parse tree, not as raw text. The results have been mixed. If you'd like to experiment with the idea, you could try paredit.el, which provides syntax-driven editing for lisp-like languages in emacs. Some people even like it. Speaking of Lisp... a Lisp would make this kind of thing so much easier to experiment with. After all *code is data* is one of the central concepts of Lisp-like languages. For full editor round-tripping, however, you'd have to figure out some way of working comments into said data structure. // ben > On Tue, Jun 29, 2010 at 10:50 AM, Lyle <[email protected]> wrote: >> >> Reinier's Rules (ha!) are... > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "The Java Posse" group... -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
