Re: IDE

[Dmitry Gutov]

On 10/24/2015 08:42 PM, Drew Adams wrote:

> I'm not contrasting TAGS with Gnu Global.  You are free to do
> that.  I am not arguing in favor of TAGS over other indexing
> and querying mechanisms.

Emacs doesn't have any real abstraction over TAGS files. etags.el 
basically operates on its contents.

> The TAGS file feature defines an index format and an index
> query mechanism.  That's all.  How and when the content of a
> given index gets generated or updated is a different question.

The index doesn't even say what kind of hit it is. Is it a definition? 
Is it a reference? Is it both? Like, a method override.

> And that generation/updating involves parsing, which has
> been acknowledged to be the hard part.

There are several parts, of varying difficulties.

> Everything you say in support of claiming that the data
> structure "*is* a problem" is, in fact statements about
> the problem of parsing, not the data structure format.

Nothing I've said about the file format yet is concerned with parsing.

> If you want to argue that any use of *files* to hold the
> index structure is problematic then do so explicitly.

Flat files, yes. Not any kind of files, obviously.