scheme IDE

Hello

Two months ago I thought that it's time for me to write mature and
serious application in C. My choice was yet another Scheme-aware GTK2
editor, which will be in future (hopefully) a part of Scheme IDE based
on guile.
As a complete newbie in scheme world I'm asking you for some tips and
advices or requests. What is essential in your work with Scheme code,
what features of your current editor are most useful and what features
you would like to see?
I'm focusing on guile because it is big and guile main objective is to
be embedded in C applications, but it lacks a good non-vi, non-emacs
editor.

Kamil Ignacak

Kamil,

> Two months ago I thought that it's time for me to write mature and
> serious application in C. My choice was yet another Scheme-aware GTK2
> editor, which will be in future (hopefully) a part of Scheme IDE based
> on guile.

> As a complete newbie in scheme world I'm asking you for some tips and
> advices or requests. What is essential in your work with Scheme code,
> what features of your current editor are most useful and what features
> you would like to see?

I think you should take a look at the following book:

The Craft of Text Editing - http://www.finseth.com/craft/

This book covers the basic features of a good text editor, mainly
focusing of Emacs-like editors.

As far as Scheme coding is concerned, take a look at these
editors/IDEs to get a feel of what Scheme programmers really care
about :

XEmacs: http://www.xemacs.org and it's Scheme modes (cmuscheme)
DrScheme: http://www.plt-scheme.org
SchemeWay: http://schemeway.sourceforge.net


Cheers,

Dominique Boucher
SchemeWay Project
http://schemeway.sourceforge.net

Why don't you write the application itself in Scheme?

campbell@bloodandcoffee.net (Taylor Campbell) writes:

> Why don't you write the application itself in Scheme?
>
Good question. FWIW, Guile has pretty good GTK2 bindings now, see
http://home.gna.org/guile-gnome </plug>

Cheers, Andy
--
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2

Latein ist das humanoide Äquivalent zu Fortran.
-- Alexander Bartolich in at.linux

Kamil Ignacak wrote:
> Hello
>
> Two months ago I thought that it's time for me to write mature and
> serious application in C. My choice was yet another Scheme-aware GTK2
> editor, which will be in future (hopefully) a part of Scheme IDE based
> on guile.
> As a complete newbie in scheme world I'm asking you for some tips and
> advices or requests. What is essential in your work with Scheme code,
> what features of your current editor are most useful and what features
> you would like to see?

It's going to be really, really hard to improve on Emacs
for scheme editing.  The basic scheme-mode is good, and
there are some customized scheme-editing modes avalable
as EL files that are even better.

But, at a minimum:
Autoindentation
Paren Matching
Paren Walking (jump to matching paren)
syntax coloring (scheme has no reserved words, but assume
people want to know when they're using the names
of functions and syntax defined in R5RS)
Jump to definition/Jump back


Bear

Ray Dillinger <bear@sonic.net> writes:

> But, at a minimum:
>     Autoindentation
>     Paren Matching
>     Paren Walking (jump to matching paren)
>     syntax coloring (scheme has no reserved words, but assume
>          people want to know when they're using the names
>          of functions and syntax defined in R5RS)
>     Jump to definition/Jump back

I would add:

S-expression-based movements
- forward/backward S-expression
- upward S-expression
S-expression-based selection
- select next/previous S-expression
- select enclosing S-expression
Mouse copy
You move your mouse over an S-expression, press a key
sequence, and the S-expression is copied at the insertion
point (or replaces the selection, if any). This is a very
useful feature when you don't have code completion on
local variables.
Interaction with an interpreter
- start/restart a Scheme interpreter in a console
- eval S-expression
- eval top-level expression
- eval selection
- eval buffer (file being edited)


Now let me give some advice to the OP. I think that if he wants to
write a very good Scheme IDE, he should begin writing some Scheme code
right now (i.e. undertake a non-trivial Scheme project first). I tried
many Scheme plugins for the Eclipse environment in the past months,
written by students for term projects [1]. They were not bad, but they
were almost useless for serious Scheme programming. I guess the main
reason is that these students were not Scheme programmers
themselves. And they put lot of effort in providing some ""
features like syntax coloring (and understanding the Eclipse
framework...), but not on core editing features. I would immediately
choose a Scheme editor that provides S-expression-based movements,
selection, and (correct!) auto indentation, over one providing only
syntax coloring.

My 2 cents.

[1] I'm not assuming that the OP is a student. But he clearly stated
that he is a Scheme newbie, which is almost equivalent for me in this
context. Scheme code editing is quite different from C or Java code
editing.

Dominique Boucher
The SchemeWay Project
http://schemeway.sourceforge.net

Ray Dillinger <bear@sonic.net> writes:
> But, at a minimum:
>     Autoindentation
>     Paren Matching
>     Paren Walking (jump to matching paren)
>     syntax coloring (scheme has no reserved words, but assume
>          people want to know when they're using the names
>          of functions and syntax defined in R5RS)
>     Jump to definition/Jump back

I would add:

S-expression-based movements
- forward/backward S-expression
- upward S-expression
S-expression-based selection
- select next/previous S-expression
- select enclosing S-expression
Mouse copy
You move your mouse over an S-expression, press a key
sequence, and the S-expression is copied at the insertion
point (or replaces the selection, if any). This is a very
useful feature when you don't have code completion on
local variables.
Interaction with an interpreter
- start/restart a Scheme interpreter in a console
- eval S-expression
- eval top-level expression
- eval selection
- eval buffer (file being edited)


Now let me give some advice to the OP. I think that if he wants to
write a very good Scheme IDE, he should begin writing some Scheme code
right now (i.e. undertake a non-trivial Scheme project first). I tried
many Scheme plugins for the Eclipse environment in the past months,
written by students for term projects [1]. They were not bad, but they
were almost useless for serious Scheme programming. I guess the main
reason is that these students were not Scheme programmers
themselves. And they put lot of effort in providing some ""
features like syntax coloring (and understanding the Eclipse
framework...), but not on core editing features. I would immediately
choose a Scheme editor that provides S-expression-based movements,
selection, and (correct!) auto indentation, over one providing only
syntax coloring.

My 2 cents.

[1] I'm not saying that the OP is a student. But he clearly stated
that he is a Scheme newbie, which is almost equivalent for me in this
context. Scheme code editing is quite different from C or Java code
editing.

Dominique Boucher
The SchemeWay Project
http://schemeway.sourceforge.net

Ray Dillinger <bear@sonic.net> writes:

> But, at a minimum:
>     Autoindentation
>     Paren Matching
>     Paren Walking (jump to matching paren)
>     syntax coloring (scheme has no reserved words, but assume
>          people want to know when they're using the names
>          of functions and syntax defined in R5RS)
>     Jump to definition/Jump back

That's pretty lame.  Even DrScheme has all that, and more, and it is a
tenet of c.l.s religion to revile DrScheme as an editor.  DrScheme
even has *real* syntax coloring, not that crapola Emacs variant.

Shriram

Shriram Krishnamurthi wrote:

> ... DrScheme
> even has *real* syntax coloring, not that crapola Emacs variant.
>
> Shriram

Not knowing what `crapola' means, I was reading the helpdesk to see what
DrScheme has regarding syntax-coloring that was not `crapola'.  The docs
say:

Each Definitions window has a Check Syntax button. Clicking this
button makes DrScheme analyze the program source and identify any
syntax errors *without* having to run the program. (my emphasis)

So, I typed the following:

(let-syntax ([foo
(lambda (x)
(delete-file "fubar")
(syntax-case x ()
[(_ x) #'(quote x)]))])
(foo 12))

and *without* executing the program, I pressed the "Check Syntax"
button.  Well, it didn't go very well as fubar got fuedbar.

At that point, I realized that I like my crapola Emacs variant.

Aziz,,,

PS.  Please take it as constructive criticism.  Having implemented a
syntax-case expander, I know that *real* syntax coloring and syntax-case
(or even syntax-rules) don't get along very well.  However, I know that
PLT has brought us many  things to make scheme pleasant to learn.
DrScheme's syntax-coloring nicely covers 99% of the common uses (maybe).
I wish it was better than my crapola Emacs.

Shriram Krishnamurthi <sk@cs.brown.edu> wrote in message news:<w7dllcsouh9.fsf@cs.brown.edu
>...
> Ray Dillinger <bear@sonic.net> writes:
> 
>
> That's pretty lame.  Even DrScheme has all that, and more, and it is a
> tenet of c.l.s religion to revile DrScheme as an editor.  DrScheme
> even has *real* syntax coloring, not that crapola Emacs variant.
>

An editor that doesn't suport M-x tetris shouldn't even be called
an editor.

Besides, emacs is less resource-hungry than DrScheme. :-)


cheers,
felix