Need reflection facilities

[Lars Ivar Igesund]

Bradley Smith wrote:

> 
> Dave Woldrich wrote:
>> == Quote from Georg Wrede (georg at nospam.org)'s article
>>> Dave Woldrich wrote:
>>>> If I had reflection in a systems-programming language like D, the tools
>>>> that could be written to work with D would be incredible.
>>> You might want to elaborate a little, maybe Walter is reading. ;-)
>> 
>> You know, I made that comment sortof as a stream-of-consciousness aside. 
>> But your suggestion made me think a little harder about it, because the
>> kind of type information that Eclipse builds for languages like Java
>> would require quite a trick to pull off in D.
>> 
>> Basically, Eclipse knows about every symbol and every class as you
>> develop as you
>> type them (in Java).  It can do symbol typeahead suggestions, realtime
>> reporting of syntax and missing symbol errors, automatic suggestions for
>> error quick fixes,
>> etc.  It has panels that can show you complete type hierarchies of
>> anything in the workspace, and these hierarchies will rearrange
>> themselves in realtime as you make
>> changes to the classes they are displaying.  It has refactorings where
>> you can push down and pull up classes, rename symbols globally, etc.
> 
> I could be wrong, but my understanding is that Eclipse implements these
> features with direct editing of the code symbol tree and automatic
> incremental compilation, not from reflection. Java reflection is a
> runtime feature.

Yes, the Descent Eclipse plugin has ported most of the DMD parser to be used
in Eclipse, such that it can build it's own code tree necessary for this
stuff to work. Reflection is not part of it.

-- 
Lars Ivar Igesund
blog at http://larsivi.net
DSource & #D: larsivi
Dancing the Tango