On Jan 02, 2007, at 7:54 PM, Dr. Scott Steinman wrote:
My top 3 choices are for features that allow a third-party tool
market to emerge:
1. A "plugin" API for the IDE, that is, the ability to add editing
and programming tools directly to the IDE that would be accessed
through menu items or toolbar items. Many other IDEs, such as
Eclipse, IDEA, Visual Studio, NetBeans and JBuilder allow this.
2. An API for inspection of the compiler abstract syntax tree and
symbol table for tools such as project reports, quality assurance,
refactoring, etc. Eclipse, NetBeans and IDEA all allow this.
3. Introspection of class properties and methods to get information
about symbols in the frameworks such as modules, classes,
interfaces, methods, properties, etc. Java, C# and Objective-C
allow this. Trying to get this information from the on-line docs
results in information that is always out of date.
The lack of these feature has seriously impaired my ability to make
progress on my Reality Check project. It is simply not worth my
time as a lone programmer on a free project to rewrite the entire
RB compiler front end simply to get syntax and symbol information
from program source code (with no way to get framework symbols).
Why duplicate all this effort in a free-standing tool because I
can't integrate it into the IDE and take advantage of existing code?
As much as I love RB, it's the lack of high-end programming tools
that makes me keep thinking of going back to Java or Cocoa.
Bingo !
I'm sure the community could/would provide some very useful tool IF
these things were possible
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