Eli Zaretskii wrote:
Refactoring requires a lot more infrastructure than what etags and
ebrowse provide.
I'm not convinced, but I won't argue.
The tools that people are excited about differ from etags and ebrowse
by virtue of their incremental nature (updating the databases as the
code is modified) and precision. The precision aspect is mainly a
Java thing since the simple (enough) scoping rules and absence of
syntactic abstraction make incremental parsing tractable.
If you were to argue and you argued that the actual software
engineering practice of refactoring and other correctness-preserving
global transforms doesn't need such heavy guns, and is very well-served
by more simply text based tools like Emacs has, etc: well, you'd get
no argument back from me.
But, afaict from watching people in various communities talk about it,
Eclipse's Java features have basically taught the utility of
global transforms to many programmers. So many people tend to be
excited about the Eclipse approach and to assume that that's how things
are supposed to work.
-t
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