RE: LFM + LFSP = LFE?

[Avi Bryant <address@hidden>]

On Thu, 12 Jun 2003, Scott McKay wrote:

> So that's a bug in Eclipse, right?

>From my point of view, yes.  I don't have much to argue about with anyone
that agrees with that statement.

>  What the Dylan
> environment (which I'll refer to as FD) does is show
> you just the single source definition in its browsers
> and the debugger.  You can edit the code right in
> the browser if you want, or you can click on an
> "edit file" button and get to a full-sized editor
> to edit the "home" source file for the definition.
> It's entirely up to you.

Yes, sounds very nice.  Out of curiosity - how frequently did you actually
click "edit file"?

> What the Smalltalk model loses is the organizational
> intent of the original author of the code, which I
> think is very important and is not well captured by
> anything other than source files, or something very
> much like source files.

Smalltalk has always grouped methods into named method categories, which
capture organizational intent pretty well IMO.  I've never understood why
no other languages (that I know of) have adopted this.

But if the reason you want source files is for organization, and not
because you want to do all your coding in emacs, then we agree.  It's the
reliance on text editors, not on text files, that I take issue with.

> You never need to do an "open" in FD.  You can always
> just directly edit a definition.  You do need to do a
> save, but I think that's right and proper even in a
> definition-based editing environment.  So, as I said,
> you don't need to muck about importing and exporting.

Well, at some point you must tell the environment which files or directory
tree you want to be working with, no?  That's what I mean by importing.
If it automatically detects that the files have been changed and rebuilds
its database, that's great - it's a nice extra step of automation. If I
were going to go further with my Squeak/CVS integration, it sounds like
there are a number of ideas I could usefully steal from FD. ;)

Avi