Re: David, have you thought about using an existing editor?

["Randy Brukardt" <randy@rrsoftware.com>]

"Hubert" <herrdoktor@fumanchu.com> wrote in message 
news:xvCvw.1015500$Ub6.871244@fx20.iad...
>@ David Botton
>
> I have been following your posts about your idea for a IDE for Ada. I was 
> thinking about somehting like that myself but was quickly discouraged 
> because of the huge amount of work that this would be.

Writing an visual editor is not a "huge amount of work". I've written more 
than a dozen of them over the years, including one for CP/M written in Z80 
assembler (RED), and our MS-DOS TUI editor for Janus/Ada (JAWS). Plus the 
entire "SLED" series of sample programs for Claw, building editors three 
different ways. In modern systems, most of the complex edit stuff will be 
available in some form in your GUI toolkit. (No one is going to build a GUI 
from scratch today, as I had to with RED and the original JAWS.)

What's a lot of work is all of the Ada-specific stuff that one would want: 
auto-indentation, syntax colorization, project management interfacing, build 
management, and so on. And very little of that would appear in any useful 
sense in some existing system. Even that which did would have to be bent to 
fit into an existing scheme, which is likely to be at least as much work as 
building something that makes sense from a blank slate.

So you're probably right about the amount of work, but wrong that there is 
any sensible way to avoid it.

                                 Randy.