[MonoDevelop] Managed Line Editor

Kamil Skalski kamil.skalski at gmail.com
Tue Oct 31 14:27:04 EST 2006


> things? Better integrate parsers with editors?
>

An extremely cool idea would be to build editor based from the
beginning on abstract-syntax-trees. The internal representation of
presented text would be the tree of nodes structured according to the
syntax of the language given text is written in.
Ok, this is more of a research / experiment idea, but the consequences
are interesting.

Cons:
- it would be quite hard to design a flexible enough, yet still
usable, tree representation which would be suitable for every possible
language / text type to be presented and edited
- it would be generally harder to implement, at least at the beginning
where we need to map user input into code structure changes
- similar to the previous point, arbitrary text pastes and cuts would
be more expansive and harder to implement

Pros:
- syntax highlighting, code folding, refactoring, etc. would be almost
"core features" of the editor itself
- code formatting features would be... hm, just a tiny issue of presentation
- faster (because one layer closer to the implementation) code
analysis and advanced programming assistance features - language
bindings could easily analyze existing AST and track its changes
instead of re-parsing text all the time


-- 
Kamil Skalski
http://nazgul.omega.pl


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