Simon Beaumont wrote:
I built an eclipse IDE plugin for a prolog .. it's very easy to get nice
looking tools - and you leverage all the file and view management and some
great facilities for free - the main effort is in parsing the source and
providing nice outline views and code sense and pretty formatting etc. as
well as integrating the iterpreter - In fact everything we already have in
the emacs based OPI.
Don't get me wrong - Eclipse is cool I use it every day to do complex java
server side projects - UML/running tomcat/jboss in debug and such like - it's
brilliant for that and easily the best pure java gui. But oz has an
interpreter and nice coding / debug support in emacs - there is nothing
essentially extra that Eclipse could provide over that - so you spend a few
weeks replicating what we already have. Why not spend the time doing an
application or providing some features on the wish list?
I remember when emacs was seen as the ultimate all singing and dancing
workbench - is this no longer true - am I getting old here?
If I haven't dissuaded your well intentioned plans - do get hold of the
eclipse book as it will help a lot at design time and be prepared to spend
some hours on the eclipse site where there are some articles that will ease
the initially steep curve to plugin development. Eclipse is a very powerful
(if java centric platform) I guess it's like a modern emacs (which in it's
turn is lisp centric). Don't mind old farts like me - I'll be first to give
it a go...
Simon,
thanks for the encouraging words ;-)
About the time to be spent: I think it will be certainly worth the
effort, if it allows us to attract new oz programmers, and more
importantly, if it eases the learning curve and improves the overall
experience of Oz programming. Being an old fart myself, I know from
experience that a good editor can considerably boost programmer (and
designer) productivity, so it's not just the nice look I appreciate in
Eclipse, but its extensibility.
One of the things I want in an Oz OPI is a minimum of context sensitive
support for syntax. Maybe the support for multiple paradigms made the
interfaces of the Oz base and system modules just harder to remember, or
maybe I'm really getting old and slug in assimilating new languages, but
when programming in Oz it's amazing how often one has to recheck List,
Record, Module, etc, to find out the exact syntax of a procedure, and
the order of its arguments. I made a little survey in our research group
at UCL, and it's not just me fighting with this.
I don't know about the effort it would take to put context sensitive
syntax support in Emacs though, but from what I've heard it would
certainly not be easy.
Since you had experience, ... any chance we can reuse lisp and/or mozart
code in an Eclipse plugin?
Any chance we could get you to contribute to such a project?
cheers,
Fred.
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