Re: Completions in Semantic

[Lluis]

El Wed, Oct 21, 2009 at 08:35:29AM -0400, Eric M. Ludlam ens deleit� amb les 
seg�ents paraules:
> Just as an FYI about the semantic tag info (which you seem to be
> alluding to), is that it provides all that info, though not necessarily
> from the completion engine via a UI.

Well, it's been a long time since I played with the completion interfaces
provided in CEDET, but I already knew all that information was available
somewhere in semantic :)

I just didn't know documentation was also available as one of the tag's
attributes, which reminds me that:
    1) One-liner doxygen description shows up with the `*/' at the end
    2) Descriptions of the form: /*< description */ 
       are not assigned to the correct variable
    3) One more nice feature would be to have the "show long documentation"
       parse doxygen-specific commands such that parameters descriptions are
       shown more clearly

I also tried with `completion-ui', `auto-complete' and `company-mode', which are
the ones I've found that provide completion UIs through overlays (hope I'm using
the correct term), which is the form i feel more comfortable with.

But as far as I've been able to see, none of these three provide the features
I've mentioned, although they do provide semantic-based backends for completion.


[...]
> Since it uses a code analyzer, you tend not to need too much in the way of
> narrowing of scope since it knows what symbols don't fit in a particular
> context, so it doesn't provide them as completions.

Right, that's just a feature I found in company-mode, and thought it was nice
when working with a large amount of possible completions; which is not usually
my case, now that I work mostly in C++.


> If core emacs completion prompts were to select some metadata based
> approach to completion tables, the Semantic tag format is pretty simple,
> and could provide what is needed.

See, my Emacs/elisp knowledge is too scarce to have an opinion on this :)

I once tried diving into semantic to accomplish what I wanted, together with
completion-ui, but back then it was just my first or second week with emacs and
lisp, so I think accomplishing that really was out of my possibilities :)

In any case, I don't know if there is general interest on the features I have
described. If not, I might eventually try to implement that, but would need some
advice on which are the "standard" mechanisms from which to build up so that the
solution is near to the least convoluted outcome.

But this will be "some day"... my first contact is still to be finished with a
small improvement to VC to allow filling the commit report with "C-x 4 a"
without having to fill up a changelog file; which I've been postponing for too
long.

Thanks,
    Lluis

-- 
 "And it's much the same thing with knowledge, for whenever you learn
 something new, the whole world becomes that much richer."
 -- The Princess of Pure Reason, as told by Norton Juster in The Phantom
 Tollbooth