[Kc] editors and IDEs (was: May Meeting)

[David Nicol]

On Wed, May 7, 2008 at 7:57 PM, Andrew Moore <amoore at mooresystems.com> wrote:

>  For instance, if I have a CGI object, which is an object with a
>  "param" method, I should be able to type:
>
>  $cgi->par

the conventions to understand such things are well established in practice;
the perl IDE could note that C<my $cgi= CGI->new> for instance occurred,
and adjust accordingly.

An editor supporting a style is a very strong motivation to use that
style; I started using FIXME in comments because gvim highlights it;
whenever I find myself having to use a different editor that
supposedly is aware of perl syntax I discover that it will match
active and commented-out closing brace pairs and then for the next few
weeks I will be very careful
to comment out some matching syntax whenever I comment out uneven braces.



>  and it should offer "param" as a completion to that. Maybe I have to
>  hit my "autocomplete" button (M-/), or maybe if I pause it just offers
>  a little drop-down of options (think "Google Suggests"), but it should
>  know that "param" is an option, and "parmesan" is not. (Maybe it
>  should also know that that method takes 0 or 1 parameters.)
>
>  If if I have just defined a hash with a set of keys in it, and I type
>  the first half of one of the keys, it should suggest some of the keys
>  as possible completions.
>
>  Or, If I start typing a bare word, it may suggest some of the subs in
>  the current package or core as options.
>
>  Some other languages have editors that do some of these things. Perl
>  doesn't really (yet).

All the features that "use strict" demands are syntactic and would
(provided that the editor can find the module files) be excellent
candidates for marking in an editor.