Re: IDE

[Eric Ludlam]

On 10/12/2015 11:18 AM, Dmitry Gutov wrote:
> On 10/11/2015 08:37 PM, Eric Ludlam wrote:
> > If you have a tool that parses already (such as exuberent
> > CTags), you can instead just start at the high level tagging parser and
> > skip all the lower level stuff.
>
> Right.
>
> > If you have an existing completion engine for cases where you happen to
> > have an interpreter with completion, or something else, you can just
> > override the completion engine directly.
>
> You haven't answered the question about the advantage of doing it this 
> way. If I override the completion engine directly, what main benefits 
> of using CEDET are left? I mean, are they worth working on defining a 
> grammar for the language, and keeping it up-to-date. A grammar can 
> take a lot of effort by itself.

The primary reason is that having tag information in a buffer so you can 
access it quickly is helpful.

The reason you'd want a tag-level parser at all is to provide:
1) a database of tags in the buffer, plus positional information
2) a database of tags across a project to search through
3) a standard way of knowing where you are in relation to other tags

Simple things like showing the function you are editing, highlighting 
tags with various features in different ways,or knowing what class the 
method you are in are handy and quick little features that can be built 
generically on top of CEDET, but which require piles of code to do 
individually without that type of support. imenu, etags, ctags, global, 
ident, etc all exist because it is useful, but none of those tools get 
bound into a buffer, so their level of usefulness is limited to "jump to 
a location" instead of handy inline features.

> > The srecode tool does this,
> > and there is an experimental clang version in CEDET's repository as 
> > well.
>
> srecode overrides the completion engine? Why?

Because it is a multi-mode buffer, so sometimes you want to complete 
srecode symbols, and sometimes you want to complete from a different 
language.

Eric