Re: History of code completion

On 8 Nov 2001 23:21:44 -0500, Lex Spoon <lex@cc.gatech.edu> wrote:
>genew@mail.ocis.net (Gene Wirchenko) writes:
>> I can do it myself. ...
>> It depends on the language, but I expect theoretical limitations
>> bite often. Compiler preprocessors probably raise much havoc with
>> such editors.
>
> Good point -- C is hard to support in a system like this, in the
> fully general case. Then again, I'm sure there is a large subset of
> preprocessor usage that *could* be supported, if only people
> bothered.


Lisp systems are pretty good about tracking macros and macro
expansions, so I don't think that it's an insurmountable problem.
About the only major annoyance is that teaching Emacs to indent new
macro-created syntax is a PITA. The <bigwig> language has an
interesting solution to this gripe: they specify indentation hints
(via special comments) as part of the macro definition, so that
editors and pretty-printers can correctly format macros.


    http://www.brics.dk/bigwig


Neel
[C macros are hard because you can (and people do) mess around with
statement and expression bracketing. In one infamous case, Steve
Bourne originally wrote the Bourne shell with a bunch of macros to
make C look just like Algol68, with definitions like THEN mapping to
") {" which is perfectly valid but kind of hard to teach to a syntax
editor. -John]

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