[plt-scheme] Re: On C#

Yeah -- one of the standard complaints. :)

Completing the methods of a class is tricky, since you don't have a
type system to tell you what the pool of methods is.

You can do completion based on the keywords in, say, the hdindex and
keywords files you find in the documentation directories. That's
probably the easiest approximation.

Good luck with your research!

Robby

On 5/22/07, Paulo J. Matos <pocm at soton.ac.uk> wrote:
> Ok, so let me explain the context so that everyone understands the issue.
>
> Here in University of Southampton, Group of Dependable Systems and
> Software Engineering we have a Software Engineering Special Interest
> Group where we meet every week. This week we talked about
> [requirements] traceability in agile methods. One of the suggestions
> that came up was that we could develop a traceability tool which helps
> user trace requirements/tests/code using linking identifiers, so that
> you can for example say: This code implements this requirement or,
> this test was developed to test this code in mind. Now guess you
> change a requirement, the tool might alert you that you need to change
> the code at that point, etc etc.
>
> Well, as in a discussion lots of issues came to mind, one of them was
> the programming language we could use.
> (the resulting opinions from the 6 that were present)
> - Java was down immediately since most of us didn't want to mess with Java.
> - C/C++ was too low level for some.
> - Haskell, Dylan were too mystic and 'mathematical' for others.
> - C# came up as a possibility
>
> Then I suggested PLTScheme or if people are against it, Ocaml.
>
> After a lot of discussion Ocaml was scratched. C# and PLTScheme were
> now up to discussion. I was mentioning that I had implemented some IDE
> features in an internal tool and that I had tried to implement them in
> PLTScheme without success mainly because I do not know the API and I
> was not yet able to find examples to guide me through implementing
> stuff like that. The main feature which was complained about was:
> - Facility to get a list of class methods when you do "(send class "
>
> This is not really important but what I saw is that it is _really_
> important for them who are not used to programming in Scheme. However,
> most, but not all, are inclined to C#, not because they know the
> language but because the IDE has this feature.
>
> It's quite hard to beat such argument. No matter saying that's not the
> important thing. So, I told them I would try to look at the code and
> see if it's easy to implement and I'll do a PLTScheme demo next week
> so that they could see the IDE and some of the language features of
> interest to us.
>
> In fact, in a way I understand them, because most of them have used in
> their classes during their degree Eclipse, or .NET and now if they
> don't see an IDE full of class trees, way to generate code by filling
> a couple of boxes etc, they get scared. One of the colleagues which
> also supports Scheme because he wants to learn something new said that
> as PhD students we need to research new possibilities instead of
> getting stuck to the traditional ways but that remark didn't help to
> the discussion, anyway.
>
> Another thing I mentioned, probably a year ago but can't find it in
> the mailing list would be to have a live helper frame showing up help
> on the current keyword. Still I'm having a lot to do and I'm looking
> at some syntax-case publications at the moment so trying to look
> deeply into the DrScheme tools API or source code is unfortunately a
> no go.
>
> So, that's it.
>
> Sorry for posting this to the wrong list but I was probably thinking
> about plt-scheme and just wrote it in the sender instead of the
> recipients name. Frustrating thing is, I noticed immediately after
> pressing send. I still tried discard but gmail was too fast and sent
> the email anyway.
>
> Oh well... :)
>
> Cheers,
>
> Paulo Matos
>
> On 5/22/07, Grant Rettke <grettke at acm.org> wrote:
> > It is so hard to accept that with which we are not familiar.
> >
> > I can't stand reading dark on light for example...as you well know :) (thanks!)
> >
> > On 5/22/07, Robby Findler <robby at cs.uchicago.edu> wrote:
> > > Still, you tantalize us :)
> > >
> > > Are the missing niceties the usual things people complain about (tab
> > > completion, for example), or are they new ones?
> > >
> > > Robby
> > > _________________________________________________
> > >   For list-related administrative tasks:
> > >   http://list.cs.brown.edu/mailman/listinfo/plt-scheme
> > >
> >
> >
> >
>
>
> --
> Paulo Jorge Matos - pocm at soton.ac.uk
> http://www.personal.soton.ac.uk/pocm
> PhD Student @ ECS
> University of Southampton, UK
>