← Back to context

Comment by icebraining

11 years ago

That's a kludge. "True" form is text and the the IDEs add a layers on top.

Why is text the "true" form? What's the difference between an IDE that uses text as the "true" form and one which uses a tree as the "true" form but uses text as the UI and serialization format?

4 comments

icebraining

Reply
narag  11 years ago

Why is text the "true" form?

It shouldn't. It's what the current IDEs do.

The difference is that the program is currently written as text and passed to the compiler, that expects text. The IDEs make a parallel construction to offer some goodies to the programmer.

How I think it should be: the IDE would actually do the syntax checking and reference resolving work, so any program you have written is in fact pre-validated.

There would be performance enhancements, but that's not the only advantage. One example that comes quickly to mind is applying macros, writing GUI generation wizards based on DB schema and in general applying "DRY".

  • icebraining  11 years ago

    How I think it should be: the IDE would actually do the syntax checking and reference resolving work, so any program you have written is in fact pre-validated.

    But IDEs already do that. An example I'm familiar with is Java on Eclipse - it validates the code as you're writing it and marking compilation errors. Your others example have been done as well.

    You're right that you need an AST to do the properly, but when there's a cheap and reliable way to convert a blob of text to an AST - parsing - the distinction is somewhat irrelevant.