On 06/05/13 16:13, David Robinow wrote:
I certainly agree about IDLE and prefer a text editor myself. I don't
use Linux much and haven't noticed the "practically an IDE" part. Could
you expound?
Unix is a software engineers OS. It comes with dozens of tools and they
are nearly all integrated. So for example the text search tool grep can
output its results in the same format as the compiler outputs errors.
This allows text editors to implement features like "goto next error"
and "goto next grep line" using common code. And many different editors
use that same standard format.
Other tools analyze test coverage, profile execution, monitor system
calls, analyze core dumps etc. Similarly the Unix debuggers tend to have
common mechanisms which make them easy to integrate with editors.
The tags tools allow the OS to build a database of function definitions
so that an editor can jump from a function reference to a function
definition with ease.
Other OS features like command pipelines, a plethora of scripting
languages, and a gazillion text processing commands all mean Unix can do
most of the tricks modern IDEs do in other platforms.
The things that are less easy to reproduce tend to be things like
command completion, tooltip help and project creation/maintenance. There
are tools to help with those but not as slick as an IDE.
Those are some of my favourite "Unix as an IDE" features, I'm sure there
are others I've missed.
--
Alan G
Author of the Learn to Program web site
http://www.alan-g.me.uk/
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