What I don't understand is why a Perl editor should be written in Perl itself. You're ultimatly dealing with a stream of bytes, which is as a completly language-agnostic concept as you can find.

But woolfy was specifically describing a Perl-specific code editor, not an arbitrary-stream-of-bytes editor.

Beyond just syntax highlighting, such a tool might be expected to support the features of some advanced Java and Smalltalk code editors, like:

• symbol name lookup (tab-completion for variable names, when typing a function name show an example of the arguments it takes, etc);
• refactoring editor (for example, select a few lines of code and invoke the "move to new subroutine" refactoring, and automatically have those lines replaced by a call to a new subroutine with proper argument passing and return value assignment);
• run-time/debugger integration (interpreting code as you type, setting break points, editing code in a running program and then continuing);
• documentation support (WHYSIWYG POD editor, fill in some kinds of POD automatically);
• testing support (automatic running of tests in the background, integrated display of profiling results and code or pod coverage analysis);
• plugin support (to let others add support for working with Class::MethodMaker, Class::Contract, Aspect, or other specialized approaches to Perl coding).

Even if it only implemented some subset of the above, I think such an editor would be providing real value, beyond the traditional solution of a good text editor with syntax coloring and automatic indenting.

And I don't see how you could really do justice to such a tool without implementing it in Perl, or at least delegating key portions to an embedded Perl instance.

---

---

Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!

Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.

Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.

Please read these before you post! —

• How do I compose an effective node title?
• How do I post a question effectively?
• Markup in the Monastery

Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:

a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr

You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)

	For:		Use:
	&		&
	<		&lt;
	>		&gt;
	[		&#91;
	]		&#93;

Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?

See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.