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Re: No automatic tabs in Emacs?


From: Elena
Subject: Re: No automatic tabs in Emacs?
Date: Mon, 6 Dec 2010 01:56:04 -0800 (PST)
User-agent: G2/1.0

On Dec 6, 5:30 am, Miles Bader <mi...@gnu.org> wrote:
> Elena <egarr...@gmail.com> writes:
> > As a matter of fact, if you want to enable CEDET's smart completion,
> > you have to add all included headers by hand!
>
> I don't think that's true.  I tried it, and it seems to handle #includes
> automatically just fine -- but obviously doesn't know about non-standard
> include directories (that is, it can only find include files in the
> current dir and /usr/include); AFAICS, there _is_ no way to get that
> information from source code alone.

Thank you, Miles, for the clarification. However, are we sure CEDET
looks for headers included by source code, instead of just parsing
some known headers (e.g. standard C library, etc.)?

> Something like VS has this information because it forces you to use its
> build system, and so of course you specify the required info at that level.

VS had[1] this information because it was designed to be part of a
chain of tools.  It used to parse the environment variables INCLUDE,
LIB and PATH to know where to look for headers, libraries and tools
respectively.

> CEDET _does_ some sort of  project-management mode where this sort of
> meta-level information can be specified (and from which it will generate
> Makefiles or whatever), but I've never used it.

Miles, CEDET could have the most advanced project-management system of
this world, but if nobody knows or can figure out easily how it works,
it doesn't matter.  Don't say RTFM, please, because a lot of people do
RTFM, but can't figure out how things work anyway.  I'd bet Alex Ott
has read the docs, but apparently he didn't figure out things either
and resorted to adding headers by hand.

Please, do not take this a criticism of the work of CEDET mantainers.
Indeed, their work is remarkable.  Kudos to them!  It's just that
building and IDE out of Emacs, an IDE which would work on all the
platforms where Emacs does, would be a lot of work, and Emacs just
lacks a community large enough to push such an effort ahead.  Other
IDEs, no matter how clunky their extensibility is, compared to Emacs,
enjoy a larger enough community.  That's why I think Emacs can't be an
IDE, not even a code-editor, especially for beginners.  If Emacs users
say it isn't so, well, I just can say they don't know what an IDE is.
[2]

I think this guys sums it up (read "The Bottom Line" paragraph):
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/dotnetinterop/archive/2008/04/12/emacs-is-better-than-visual-studio-as-a-c-development-tool.aspx

[1]  This isn't the case anymore.  Last versions of VS do not parse
environment variables to get directories for includes and libraries,
but require you to write configuration files.  This is another reason
I think VS has worsened version after version.
[2]  This does not apply to languages where Emacs is the editor of
choice for developers: Common Lisp, Erlang, OCaml (I don't know about
any other).


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