[m-users.] Greetings

[Paul Bone]

On Tue, Apr 01, 2014 at 07:33:29PM +0200, Gábor Bakos wrote:
> Hi Mucaho,
> 
> On 31 March 2014 14:16, anonymous <mucaho at yahoo.com> wrote:
> 
> > I would also like to add that I found an eclipse plugin which offers
> > syntax highlighting, errors / warning (during editing) and from the looks
> > of it you can interface with existing java code more conveniently (since
> > you are in eclipse already :) ). http://kai.mercury.mind-era.com/home
> >
>    As the author of the mentioned plugin, I would add that I am not
> satisfied with the result. As I remember there were two approaches that I
> tried, but both had weaknesses. When I tried to use a simple grammar, I was
> able to report the errors in proper lines (though with additional parsing
> in the error messages), but no help during coding besides basic syntax
> highlighting. The more accurate grammar offered better experience regarding
> code completion, but the information to properly report the errors was
> lost. I was thinking proper error reporting is much more useful than code
> completion, so the downloadable plugin contains that version. Probably
> neither version is good enough for larger projects, not too well tested
> (the plugin, not the compiler).
>    Last December I bought a book about Xtext, so after reading it, I might
> have a better idea how to solve the problems related to the version with
> completion, that would be quite cool. Also a native Java Mercury compiler
> would be very useful (even without the mmc environment, preferably with
> services to find out dependencies and other cool features an IDE would
> need). If there are volunteers to work on this, I can share the code in its
> infancy, though it is very possible that this plugin will never be improved
> by myself.
> Cheers, gabor
> 

in the long term I'd like to see better API documentation tools for Mercury.
Along the lines of javadoc/doxygen.  I think that the right way to do this
is to have the compiler generate some machine-readable information that
would be necessary.  Then use a separate tool to actually format that
machine readable information into something useful for humans (like HTML,
PDF whatever).  This is relevant because an IDE plugin should also be able
to use the same machine readable information to make things like
code-completion more useful.  Specifically your IDE could show you
completions that match the type of a parameter.


-- 
Paul Bone