John Meacham wrote:
It is somewhat depressing that immutable pre-packaged macros[1] and the
simple brute-force inclusion of separate tools[2] into the editor are
hailed as innovation, when new innovations, whether they are simple
refinements of old ideas[3], excercises in orthoginality[4], or truely
new research[5] are left to the wayside. But such is the power of the
bullet point.
John
[1] many (but not all) refactoring features i have seen.
This is a little harsh.
The refactoring features I've seen (in Eclipse) are more than macros;
they are semantically aware. That is, they understand the scoping and
typing of the language and they can distinguish between 'a' in an inner
scope and 'a' in an outer scope, so they they can do a safe rename. Then
can also distinguish between List (the class imported from
my.cool.package) and List (the class imported from java.main.package)
and do a safe multi-file rename so you have a true 'atomic' class
renaming ability.
These things go well beyond syntactic macros. It is often stated that
Java has such powerful IDEs because it's such a tedious language to edit
without them, and I have some sympathy for that line of argument, but I
would love to have local definition floating and project-global rename
and so on in my haskell editor. I know people are working on this stuff.
Jules
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