[news.eclipse.technology.ldt] Re: Beyond textual represenations...

["Mike Kaufman" <mkaufman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I glanced over the list of things on the scid page, and they sound like 
things that modern IDEs do (syntax highlighting, semantic-qualified 
searching, collapsable regions), without the need to persist as an AST.

Mike Kaufman
BEA Systems, Inc.


"Scott Stanchfield" <scott@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message 
news:d1ml6r$565$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> I'm a big fan of this approach. I think Roedy Green's "SCID" Student 
> Project Writeup has a really good summary of benefits:
>
> http://mindprod.com/projects/scid.html
>
> That said, this is what VisualAge (Smalltalk, Java) did (but didn't have 
> all the bells & whistles), and caused quite an uproar because people 
> couldn't "see" their files.
>
> The problem is paradigm shift. Most folks don't want to give up "files" 
> just because they're used to "files". Some argue that they can't use 
> "grep" (to them I say the IDE can do **way** better than grep b/c of 
> context). And the bigger issue -- their favorite source control tool...
>
> But it's mostly a comfort thing that we may never get over.
>
> Of course there's also the "proprietary" issue. Just last week I had 
> someone ping me asking what a VisualAge ".dat" file was. I dusted off an 
> old VAJ CD and imported/exported the source code for him.
>
>
> So...
>
>
> I'd love to have the power of SCID, but methinks there needs to be a 
> "file" representation as well.
>
> A virtual file system would be nice here, but still runs the problem of 
> someone saving a copy of the database on a CD, coming back three years 
> later and not being able to use the code in a new tool. Of course the only 
> way to make this work is to make it really obvious to the user that they 
> should export the code.
>
> Eclipse does a good bit of file processing and stores some data info, but 
> I'd love to have a SCID... (Esp b/c I like tab characters, I hate cuddled 
> "else"s, and other stylistic things...)
>
> My 50c...
> -- Scott
>
>
> "Guillaume Pothier" <gpothier@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message 
> news:d1fm9d$93j$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
>>I am really glad that the LDT project has been created.
>> Many of the posts to this newsgroup discuss ASTs and parsers, assuming 
>> that a programming language's primary representation will always be its 
>> textual form.
>>
>> As far as I am concerned, I anticipate the day when the primary from of a 
>> programming language is its AST, or even better, Abstract Syntax Graph. 
>> Given the currently available computing power of the machines used by 
>> developpers today, I think it is no luxury to start thinking of replacing 
>> the traditional bunch of source files stored in a hierarchical filesystem 
>> by a graph of objects backed by some database system.
>>
>> There are a few obvious benefits to do so, even in the simple case of 
>> Java-only developments:
>> - No more source code formatting hell and obnoxious merge conflicts 
>> caused by formatting differences between developpers.
>> - Elimination of the parsing step from the compilation
>>
>> I think the first thing LDT should provide is a new storage metaphor 
>> based on ASTs (or ASGs). Of course, this representation issue does not 
>> solve all the problems LDT proposes to deal with, but it would be a great 
>> foundation for implementing new language support.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Guillaume Pothier
>
>