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Aucbvax.4851 fa.editor-p utzoo!decvax!ucbvax!editor-people Sat Oct 31 08:23:21 1981 Re: Integrating Editors with Programming Languages >From ihnss!cbosg!cbosgd!mark@Berkeley Sat Oct 31 08:13:58 1981 I beg to differ with Chilenskas' claim that Lisp is the best tool for integrating editors with programming languages. While it's certainly a step forward from the current text editors in one sense, there was an letter by Richard Stallman in Computing Surveys in 1978 (I forget which issue) giving 8 advantages of text editors over such systems. Note also Chilenskas' claim of only "rudimentary syntax checking". I gather from his note that Chilenskas is talking about template editors, where the user is extremely aware of the structure of his tree. While I'm sure a better system than this could be written in LISP, when I wrote the language editor for my thesis, I found I needed more pointers than LISP provides - I needed parents and left siblings in order to do an incremental parse. (I'm not familiar with MDL but if it includes user defined types, chances are good that it could be done in MDL.)

My personal bias is that the right direction is an editor that behaves like a text editor, but is 100% aware of the program being edited, including syntax and in some cases semantic checking. This is easier for a programmer to use and can do anything a template editor such as Tietelbaum's, Feiler's, or Fischer's can. The other side of the coin is that template editors are much less complex and the syntax parts are faster. However, it turns out that all the speed problems are in the semantics, which face the same problems in either flavor.

Mark Horton

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