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Re: MIME for Dylan sourcecode?
At 10:53 AM -0400 9/7/01, Eric Kidd wrote:
> > Of course, that presumes the existance of an IDE beyond ones favorite
> > text editor and command line compiler.
>
>This is not a safe assumption in the modern Unix world. At least half
>of the users have already picked their tools (Emacs, vi, nedit, CVS, make,
>autotools, etc.), and will ignore software that doesn't play nicely with
>their setup.
Yeah, I know. I'm even guilty of this myself. Mostly the problem seems to
be with the editor, which is often either totally lame in the IDE, or the IDE
only mimics or talks to editors which are not the one I want to use.
>Of the remaining users who can be talked into using an IDE, most still
>require that their source code be stored in text files (typically so they
>can use their company's CVS repository--or SourceForge's).
These are not incompatible requirements. There exist database-like code
base IDEs which will talk to standard revision control systems. VisualAge
is a specific example that I've looked at. (Unfortunately, in that specific
case, VisualAge doesn't (didn't?) talk to CVS because VisualAge uses some
Microsoft "standard" interface for speaking to revision control systems,
and there isn't (wasn't?) an implementation of that interface for CVS.
Somebody was working on one, but gave up. I haven't searched around to
see if the situation has improved in the year or so since I looked at
VisualAge and bounced it because of this problem.)
Once could imagine an IDE that used a database derived by slurping in text
files and spitting them back out in some well-defined and reproducible
form for interaction with a revision control system. That seemed to be
the direction being discussed during my brief tenure at Harlequin, for
exactly the reason of playing nicely with other tools. I don't know if
that is what was actually done and incorporated into what is now Fun-O's
product.
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