Mainstream D Programming

[Nathan Reed]

Janice Caron wrote:
> If IDEs were so great, there would be no talk of making an IDE "for
> D". Rather, your existing IDE would already be capable of doing the
> job.

Wow! I appreciate the new heights to which exaggeration has now
reached.

;)

I certainly appreciate a good general-purpose text editor in which I can 
define syntax highlighting, macros, and so forth for working with 
languages the original text editor developer never thought of.  However, 
take a look at the list of features posted by Robert above.  There is 
just no way I can see that an IDE could be designed to be sufficiently 
general that all these features could be done through customization, 
without making the "customization" a complete programming language in 
itself.  (Of course, that is exactly what emacs does...)

Languages differ enough that it actually does make sense to have 
language-specific IDEs rather than totally general-purpose IDEs.  (And 
the time/effort needed to develop a hypothetical emacs d-mode would be 
pretty much equivalent with that needed to develop a D-specific IDE.)

Thanks,
Nathan Reed