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From: firth@sei.cmu.edu.UUCP
Newsgroups: comp.lang.modula2
Subject: Re: M2Amiga, another bunch of answers
Message-ID: <3476@aw.sei.cmu.edu>
Date: Mon, 7-Dec-87 08:15:17 EST
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Posted: Mon Dec  7 08:15:17 1987
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Keywords: language sensitive editors.

In article <1336@saturn.ucsc.edu> wolf@ssyx.ucsc.edu (Mike Wolf) writes:

>Last summer I was hired to do ADA programming under VMS.  (UCSC just has
>UNIX)  The latest editor for VMS is called the Language Sensitive Editor.
>I found the LSE more of an annoyance then anything else...

For editors such as you describe, I'd agree.  An editor that just
understands the syntax is, in my opinion, useless - it makes some
trivial things easier and other trivial things harder.  The last
such editor I tried to use got junked after 2 hours, when I found
out

(a) It absolutely refused to let me put any white space in the text

(b) It would not accept comments in places the language definition
    said they were legal (eg within a procedure formal part)

It was also grindingly slow.

On the other hand, a REAL language sensitive editor would be very
useful.  Imagine placing the cursor on an identifier and being able
with one click or keystroke to bring up its declaration.  Overload
resolution and cross-module resolution done for you.  Imagine being
able to see the fully qualified name of the identifier, with another
click.  Imagine it tracking the range of a numeric expression as you
type, and displaying that range in a little box.  And so on.