in reply to Perl IDE and New Foreign APIs

I usually tweak my emacs to show me documentation (perldoc, hyperspec, man...) on F1 in every language I work with. I would hate it if the IDE documentation flickered everytime the cursor moves to a new symbol (I have never worked with eclipse, I actually guessed this behaviour from your description - might be terribly wrong or not as annoying as it sounds to me).

I had somewhat bad experiences with code-completion-helpers in delphi, which didn't always work reliably, which is, in my opinion, worse than having no such thing. Maybe eclipse performs better. To save typing I use dabbrev-expand in emacs. It looks just at the text in my edit buffer and doesn't try to parse the language. This is, of course, a rather low-level approach, but it has the big advantage of 'no surprises'.

If I need to find available methods in a class, emacs can always jump to its declaration with a few keystokes (via tags, cscope etc.). This even works if there is a lump of uncompileabe code before the point I'm working at. Can eclipse handle that?

  • Comment on Re: Java vs Perl and Eclipse vs Emacs (serious)

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Re^2: Java vs Perl and Eclipse vs Emacs (serious)
by tomazos (Deacon) on Sep 09, 2005 at 09:09 UTC
    You're most likely right about the flickering. You most likely wouldn't like the Microsoft Word style underlining of things (red for error, yellow for warning) and the menu of suggestions it offers to fix things ((a) import java.util.regex.* (b) remove Matcher (c) define new class Matcher etc) either. :)

    I've taken a look at dabbrev-expand. I think it doesn't check a foreign namespace unless you point it at the file. This is what you mean by low-level. I guess in Eclipse/Java it compiles the code continuously and autocompletes methods based on the current class or identifier at the cursor (and only them).

    When you say jump to the declaration? You mean in a different buffer it opens the file that declares the symbol? I think if the buffer doesn't compile in eclipse it will only work for class names (take you to their entry in the Type Hierarchy browser window or the original source) - otherwise it can't know which member is from which class.

    Andrew Tomazos  |  andrew@tomazos.com  |  www.tomazos.com
[reply]
      You mean in a different buffer it opens the file that declares the symbol?

      yes, exactly. And yes, you are right, I don't like word's underlinings and other uncalled-for visual distractions like popup-menus :-)

[reply]

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