On Tue, 20 Jan 2009, Max Battcher wrote: > Trent W. Buck wrote: >> Kari Hoijarvi <[email protected]> writes: >> >>> Dan Pascu wrote: >>> Program is stored as a tree, and the IDE pretty prints it, the way you >>> choose to. >> >> To handle arbitrary source formats in this way (which is what Darcs >> would need to do), you need two steps: >> >> - a READ procedure, which converts the working tree into a normal >> form. For example, a C language READ might utilize gccxml, and a >> ReStructured Text READ would use rst2xml. >> >> - a SHOW procedure, which converts the internal representation (normal >> form) to something the user can edit without going insane. >> > ... and then there is the fun that David Roundy liked to point out: how > many of us program in complete compilable (and thus > deconstructable/reconstructable) code *all the time*? What if you want > to save a non-working fragment in progress? What if you make a tiny > mistake and the file fails to parse correctly? > > You need either extremely hardened parsers that can withstand and well > recover from error... or separate patch types/source control systems > for works in progress versus tested/compiled files...
Or a structure editor, like intentional programming had, in which all your works in progress are valid syntax trees (there was a special syntactic element for "unfilled in bit", but things like brackets did match around it in the rendering). Ganesh _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list [email protected] http://lists.osuosl.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
