Hello,
My name is George Loring. I’m a Technical Expert for Walmart and gave a presentation last week at EclipseCon concerning some plugins and patches we wrote for Eclipse & CDT to help make it work for our environment. One item of particular interest was
a patch we wrote to get CDT to ignore embedded SQL statements that are within our C code. In Walmart code modules with certain extensions are ran through a pre-processor that turns these embedded SQL statements into function calls. Our patch dealt with the
portion of CDT that deals with static code analysis and syntax highlighting. For our particular situation there is also a special type of include directive that we had to code for. We added the syntax for this special include directive to cause CDT to pull
in the special header file and parse any function prototypes, macro definitions, etc.
There were others in the presentation who apparently have similar types of situations at companies they have worked for. I believe there may be some interest in implementing this in a slightly different way to allow for a user to configure certain types
of statements (maybe based on what the statement begins and ends with) so that it can be essentially ignored by CDT. Maybe the user could also configure additional include directives. Part of this configuration could also allow them to set in what color the
ignored statements should be displayed.
Another approach may be a way to allow a user to configure additional statements that are valid syntax. So, rather than ignoring the statements as our patch does it could just be told of these additional key words, how they should be treated (what type
of token) and what combination of statements were valid. I realize this is likely a bigger endeavor and maybe should be approached in a manner where a developer could install an additional language “pack” (in other words, not something they could configure
themselves), but seems less like a hack than our initial approach of just ignoring the statements completely.
Marc talked with me after my presentation and asked that I email this group to see how we might proceed. We are eager to take any advice from the group so that we might look at getting this in the core build for CDT. Eclipse & CDT are fantastic tools
for our C developers. They really have made us much more productive and quite honestly made coding in C much more enjoyable. We’d like the opportunity to help make Eclipse & CDT useful for other developers that may have similar situations as ours.
Thanks,
George Loring Technical Expert
Enablement Services
Open Source Team
