Re: C# should be last plain-text language

["Larry Barowski" <larrybarATengDOTauburnDOTeduANDthatISall>]

> "Marius Amado Alves" <maa@liacc.up.pt> wrote in message
news:mailman.1.1076068084.295.comp.lang.ada@ada-france.org...
> Peter Amey wrote:
> > Amir Yantimirov wrote:
> > > http://www174.pair.com/yamir/programming/sharplast.htm
> > > It's my view of how program development should be organized on any
> > > language....
> > Looks rather like "literate programming" [Knuth 1984].
>
> To me looks more like a specification document for something like jGRASP.

From the web page, "XML advocates can propose some format to

extend existent programming languages (XADA, XC++, XC# ...)

and express generation of any view or pure files through

transformations. Though I personally prefer binary formats

I think XML solution have more chanses to be accepted by

broad community. The other possible way is including some

META-comments in source files."



It seems to me that you don't need any of those, and would be

better off doing this another way. All the views and editing

features you want can be created on demand from plain text

source code, with only a "special comment" syntax, like

javadoc comments, for structure-specific comments and one

for "ability to mark declaration as commented out (for debug

purpose)". You can store information on the current state of

the views (what is folded, etc.) in a separate database. If

someone edits the code outside of your tool, they will lose that

state (no big deal), unless the other editor is compatible with

your tool. This way developers will be able to work with raw

source code and other editing tools if they want to (and they will

want to), but still have the views and features you want. From

the point of view of someone who uses your tool exclusively,

there is essentially no difference between a META-language or

META-comments and using a database. This is the method we

use to store source code folding information, breakpoint locations,

etc. in jGRASP.



-Larry Barowski