I'm reminded of being a lab assistant when I was still in school. "Kids" that were taking programming 1 for their "foreign language" credits would constantly as "Why is this doing that?" type of questions -- *many* of which could have been easily resolved if they only got into the habbit of pressing Ctrl-j at the end of a line instead of just hitting Enter. The first thing I usually did was mark their entire buffer and reformat it (as most of it was aligned neatly to the left margin). From there, determining things like "Um ... you know that for loop will only control one statement unless you put the block in curly-braces, right?" was a snap. As the semester progressed I'd get nasty too - If I walked up to the terminal of someone I'd helped (generally several times) before, I'd take one look at their code - if it looked like crap I'd tell them to come get me again when they cleaned it up so I could tell what was going on! LOL ... I got (most of) them trained eventually! (Damn slackers!)
'Course that was all C/C++/Pascal/Shell/Scheme type stuff then ... but it's a fine editor for Java too :-) About the only language I've seen that Emacs didn't have a good editor for was COBOL ... but that's more an abomination than a language anyway ;-O (Yes, I realize COBOL is still a very used language, but I also *wish* people would let it die!)
Peace!
Eddie
Benjamin Tomasini wrote:
Normally a reader only in this list, but here are 2 cents... With a basic knowledge of Emacs, Ant, and Perl you can conquer the world faster than with any IDE I know of. And conquer it from pretty much any shell - bash, X, even Windows!Plus, Emacs is great for cleaning up messy code. Its indent feature in java-mode (cc-mode) is quite handy.
-- Eddie Bush -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]> For additional commands, e-mail: <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
