"bearophile" <bearophileh...@lycos.com> wrote in message news:i9vs3v$142...@digitalmars.com... > Walter: > >> As we all know, tool support is important for D's success. Making tools >> easier >> to build will help with that. >> >> To that end, I think we need a lexer for the standard library - >> std.lang.d.lex. >> It would be helpful in writing color syntax highlighting filters, pretty >> printers, repl, doc generators, static analyzers, and even D compilers. > > This is a quite long talk by Steve Yegge that I've just seen (linked from > Reddit): > http://vimeo.com/16069687 > > I don't suggest you to see it all unless you are very interested in that > topic. But the most important thing it says is that, given that big > software companies use several languages, and programmers often don't want > to change their preferred IDE, there is a problem: given N languages and M > editors/IDEs, total toolchain effort is N * M. That means N syntax > highlighters, N indenters, N refactoring suites, etc. Result: most > languages have bad toolchains and most IDEs manage very well only one or > very few languages. > > So he has suggested the Grok project, that allows to reduce the toolchain > effort to N + M. Each language needs to have one of each service: > indenter, highlighter, name resolver, refactory, etc. So each IDE may link > (using a standard interface provided by Grok) to those services and use > them. > > Today Grok is not available yet, and its development is at the first > stages, but after this talk I think that it may be positive to add to > Phobos not just the D lexer, but also other things, even a bit higher > level as an indenter, highlighter, name resolver, refactory, etc. Even if > they don't use the standard universal interface used by Grok I think they > may speed up the development of the D toolchain. >
I haven't looked at the video, but that sounds like the direction I've had in mind for Goldie.