D-etractions A real world programmers view on D

[Steven Schveighoffer]

On Thu, 30 Aug 2012 14:26:41 -0400, Jacob Carlborg <doob at me.com> wrote:

> On 2012-08-30 15:35, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
>
>> Not any that I have used.  In fact, in one project that I was working
>> from an existing code base, I had to configure Visual Studio 2010 to NOT
>> fade out what it thought was commented code, because it was wrong.
>> Otherwise, it was too distracting.
>
> As I replied to Walter's post, any IDE based on Clang should be able to  
> handle this. Xcode 4 has Clang integrate from the start, There's a  
> plugin for Sublime Text and I'm pretty sure there's a plugin for vim.

I don't think the problem is solvable with CPP, because it's not always  
possible to know how it's included.

For example, if I have a file x.h which does:

#ifdef A
#define B
#endif

And I edit x.h, how does it know the original source file which includes  
x.h does or doesn't define A before including x.h?  That is the issue I  
was having.

I suppose you could refactor any C or C++ source files, but not header  
files (and most variables/members are defined in header files).

Like the D problem though, there is certainly some level of confidence you  
can have when refactoring if things aren't dependent on #ifdefs.  But I  
wouldn't want to write that code :)

> I've tried RubyMine with Ruby on Rails. It worked surprisingly well  
> without needing to add extra comments. It knows the actual types of the  
> variables and can provide accurate autocompletion in most cases. When  
> I'm saying this you should know that there are many methods in Rails  
> that are generated dynamically or uses method_missing (opDispatch).
>
> The same company have made an IDE for PHP as well, you might what to  
> give it a try:
>
> http://www.jetbrains.com/phpstorm/

Thanks, I will look at it.  Netbeans does do a pretty good job knowing  
when you have previously assigned a variable that it is of that type, but  
there are pieces that cause it to give up, like if the variable comes as a  
parameter to a function, or is not assigned in the file you are editing,  
or it is put into an array (that last one I really hate).

> I think a compiler library that can lex, parse and do full semantic  
> analysis should be able to handle this.

I think so too.  And even if it's not perfect, as long as it can *tell*  
when it's not possible, that is OK.

-Steve