Re: What IDE features do we need?

[Bruce Stephens]

Eli Zaretskii <address@hidden> writes:

[...]

> Emacs already has infrastructure for most of those features (in
> etags and in Ebrowse), sometimes even more than one package that
> offers a different implementation of the same functionality, but we
> need better UI for them and better graphical methods of presenting
> the output.

Current IDEs do them better in many cases.

Many classes might offer a "show" method, for example.  If I'm looking
at foo.show() then an IDE that can determine what type "foo" is can
show me the right declaration/definition.  Even if it can't determine
the type it can at least limit the choices to member functions.

Such things are tricky (because you want to make reasonable guesses on
syntactically invalid code---perhaps in a file that's never been
syntactically valid), but it seems to be doable enough for the
features to be useful (IMHO).

When one's using C I guess there's less motivation: you'll have
show_cons, show_string, etc., or cons_show, string_show.  Lots of
nicely distinct symbols.  But in OO languages I think there's
significant benefit in trying to get more context-dependent
information, as cedet's semantic does.