So You Want to Write Your Own Language (2014)

Re:So You Want to Write Your Own Language (2014) by waqf on Saturday May 20, 2017 @12:21AM (#14381023)

I believe in this approach, but making it usable is harder than it sounds. Once I tried watching myself program with this idea in mind. I realized I often start by typing methods which don't yet have a class, code fragments which don't yet belong to a function, even expressions which don't yet live in a statement and which refer to variables which not only don't yet exist but don't belong to any yet-existing class — maybe I'll pause half-way through writing the expression and start creating the class in another window.

So you pass through a lot of ill-defined states. For the IDE to keep up it would have to just represent explicitly "this is a code fragment which doesn't have a name", "this is a variable which isn't defined anywhere" and so forth.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:So You Want to Write Your Own Language (2014) by westoncb on Saturday May 20, 2017 @03:34AM (#14381410)

Those states are only ill-defined on the assumption that you're entering text which will be parsed. You can still enter fragments when operations are in terms of language constructs rather than characters--you have just supplied a partial set of parameters to the construct, which you can go back and finish later.

Maybe the other part of this issue is expecting to use these potentially better editors in the same way we use text editors. I would bet different patterns of interaction would surface for the new editors which aren't obvious from our present standpoint.

[ Parent | on HN ]