[news.eclipse.technology.ldt] Re: Focus on DSLs: Domain-Specific Languag

[Bob Foster <bob@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Thank you for this. Identifying stages like this seems to me to be very 
helpful. I realize yours is a very high-level view, but we need one of 
those! I will only offer four comments:

The outline leaves out content assist. Primitive content assist based on 
syntax can be provided between the second and third stages. Deeper 
content assist depends on the AST in the fifth stage.

In some cases (languages like XML) the third and fourth stages might be 
omitted.

It does seem to me that in the normal progression of events debugging 
comes last (the fourth and fifth stages are swapped). E.g., WST can edit 
XSLT, show a content outline, etc., but can't debug it.

Languages that describe presentation benefit from a WYSIWYG editor that 
works in terms of the presentation generated by the file under edit. 
HTML is the obvious example. Maybe this is the sixth stage?

Bob Foster

Luis de la Rosa wrote:
> For example, the first stage would just be hosting the language in a
> "vanilla" editor and integrating the existing language tools as External
> Tools.
>
> The second stage would add syntax highlighting (via say a keyword file.)
>
> The third stage adds integrated running via the Launch/Console APIs.
>
> The fourth stage adds debugging?
>
> The fifth stage adds parsing and AST, which opens up things like an
> Outline View, refactoring, etc.
>
>
> This isn't exact, but it would be nice for implementors to see a clear
> path to how they can make their favorite language a first class citizen
> within Eclipse.  Also, it would be useful for users to know at what
> stage their language is supported.