Re: which IDE ?

[Florian Weimer <fw@...>]

* Rob Kendrick:

> These languages have much more structure to them.  It's easier for them
> to work out what would be appropriate to offer the user when they start
> typing.  For example, there's no way before compile time that an editor
> could offer anything at all for code completion here:
>
> 	foo:<tab>

That's true for C and C++ as well.  To some extent, all those code
completions are based on heuristics.  I'm not even sure if exact code
completion based on all statically available information would be
useful for C++.

> And even for global function calls, there's no way for the editor to
> know what would be available, or even would constitutes a good guess.

If the reader can guess easily what's going on, so can the editor.
The editor's guesses need not be perfect, they just should be relevant
often enough to be helpful.

One way to get better data is to have a live VM running the
application around, and use data from that to support code navigation
and completions.  Now I don't like large, long-living VMs (which may
even run multiple applications) that much, but using this approach,
you can create very rich development environments.  Using Emacs for
Emacs Lisp development is fun, and even if you don't like the language
itself, it shows what is possible even with dynamic languages.