Is this trade-off issue regarding regular expressions also the reason that
variable names aren't qualified w.r.t. the method thay're in?
At 07:58 AM 6/21/99 , Paul Kinnucan wrote:
>At 07:39 AM 6/21/99 -0700, Brian Anderson wrote:
>>I'd love to see this revision. Also the speedbar should show handle inner
>>(tell me the full class name) and anonymous (show me the method the
>>anonymous classs is in)classes better. Finally my pet peeve (since you
>>asked), the speedbar doesn't handle all valid method names such as those
>>with underscores.
>>
>
>The speedbar relies on the buffer mode to parse the contents of a buffer and
>return something to display. In the JDE's case, the JDE returns an imenu
>structure with the classes, methods, and variables. The imenu structure
>created by java-mode uses regular expressions to parse a Java buffer. I
>found that java-mode's REs, while comprehensive, were very slow because
>they used recursive expressions. When I say slow, I mean really slow as in
>hours to parse buffers containing some types of common constructs, such as
>if-then statements. I rewrote the REs to be faster; the tradeoff is that
>the JDE RE's are somewhat less accurate when it comes to parsing the
>buffer. Using RE's to parse a syntax as complex as Java's is tricky
>business and generally entails a lot of painstaking cut-and-try work.
>Everytime you think you've accounted for every syntactic quirk of the
>language, you find another counter example. If anyone wants to take a shot
>at improving the JDE's stab at RE's, please feel free. We'd all be
>grateful. Meanwhile, I have been considering using the JDE's new Java
>parser to construct the speedbar display structure. The advantage is that
>the parser would enable a fast and fully accurate parsing of the buffer
>into classes, including inner and anonymous, methods and fields. This
>approach poses some problems. A drawback is that it would require starting
>up the BeanShell the first time you open a Java buffer. Also, what to do if
>a source file has parse errors from which the parser cannot recover? I'd be
>greatful to get other's views on this approach.
>
>Regards,
>
>Paul
___________________________________
Bruce Seely (818) 735-6833
ISX Corporation [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"On average, people are acting normal today."
