Re: Is intellisense features integration in Emacs technically possible?

[David Engster]

Stefan Monnier writes:
>>> > Why would we have to write a C++ parser and semantic analyzer?
>>> If I understood Eli correctly he is advocating the independence of Emacs
>>> for that purposes.
>
> FWIW, for the languages I care about in my work (things like SML,
> Haskell, OCaml, Coq, Agda, Twelf), parsing the syntax is not sufficient
> to provide good support: we also want type information; and inferring
> the type is very much non-trivial (it's a significant part of the whole
> implementation in some cases).

Yes. Another example are highly dynamic languages like Javascript.

> So it is important in the longer run to provide a good way to use
> external tools to get that info, since re-implementing it in Elisp
> is illusory.

In CEDET, the idea is to convert the output of external tools to the
tag structures Semantic uses. This is usually not difficult to do, and
there are many packages like this already, like for cscope, ectags,
clang, and even Firefox through MozRepl (for completing Javascript).

-David