Re: Language support for flexible handling of system-detected errors.

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

Its all well and good for some folks who are willing to take time to cobble
together their IDE out of separate tools and utilities & assume the
responsibility for making it all work together. However there are a large
number of developers in the world who need to spend their time working on
the end application and don't have time or desire to put together their own
toolkit. For those of us in that boat, a well integrated IDE that handles
everything seamlessly is a good thing.

Which group is in the majority? It probably doesn't matter. Which group
spends money on tools - and hence drives the kind of tools commercial
developers build? Obviously, the latter, since you don't see too many
off-the-shelf tools (such as a debugger) that the end user is supposed to
integrate with the rest of the tools (such as the compiler, editor, gui
builder, etc.)

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com


"Nick Maclaren" <nmm1@cus.cam.ac.uk> wrote in message
news:a7vjha$4us$1@pegasus.csx.cam.ac.uk...
>
> In article <a7vfq8$pkq$1@news.btv.ibm.com>,
> hack@watson.ibm.com (hack) writes:
> |>
> |> I sure hope you are (biased)!  To me, something like emacs is an
Integrated
> |> Development Environment -- if only the compilers and linkers etc. would
all
> |> cooperate.  Traditional IDEs are the exact opposite -- they are a world
unto
> |> themselves.  I use an IDE in the emacs sense -- I integrate multiple
envs
> |> into one global environment where I can use *all* my tools, in the
editor
> |> that I'm familiar with, exploiting its features across all those
environments
> |> (programmability via powerful macros, generalised multiple-level UNDO,
having
> |> many files in simultaneous play, etc.)  The files may come from
mainframes,
> |> from Unix boxes, or from NT boxes -- it's all integrated.  I can click
on a
> |> function invocation and find myself looking at its definition -- such
things
> |> are possible if one has decent macro support:  I'm not bound by what
somebody
> |> else thinks is good for me -- I can shape the world the way I like it.
>
> Have you ever had a production application shipped to you that
> wouldn't work outside its development environment?  And then had
> the vendor tell you that they couldn't investigate bugs outside
> it?  And then had them tell you that the bypass is that you should
> run all your production code inside it?  Even when you couldn't
> actually GET the development environment because it the vendor
> had never ported it to your (wider) environment?
>
> The answer, in my case, is "yes, and more than once".
>
>
> Regards,
> Nick Maclaren,
> University of Cambridge Computing Service,
> New Museums Site, Pembroke Street, Cambridge CB2 3QH, England.
> Email:  nmm1@cam.ac.uk
> Tel.:  +44 1223 334761    Fax:  +44 1223 334679