From: Richard Dale Date: 2005-04-29T06:04:29+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby and IDE Lothar Scholz wrote: > Hello Richard, > > RD> No, the problem is that often you can't tell the type of a ruby > variable RD> until runtime (but can you do that for PHP either?). And we > do discuss how > > Almost all PHP projects i know are functional. So you don't have a > problem with code completition - just show all variables and functions > or simply the ones with the given prefix. In the few cases where there > is a $self-> reference they run into the same problems, but PHP code > is much easier structured so your mentioned heuristic and a few more > work very well. > > Does the KDevelop class browser really show all available methods ? > Rubys scoping rules with includes of modules (global, local) are > very complex, is this really handled ? No, the KDevelop class browser isn't very clever at all, just some regular expression matching. I'd like the next version to use the ruby bison grammar and tokeniser. > If so - then even as a > competitor - i must show deep respect. I don't see you as a competitor, as I've been mainly working on the QtRuby and Korundum bindings, and have spent only a couple of months or so on KDevelop ruby support. If Arachno was a killer development environment for those apis I would be very pleased. For instance, I mailed you the other month about the debugger conventions that QtRuby uses, in case you wanted to make some minor changes to the Arachno debugger to handle QtRuby. > If not then it is much easier, but remember that most people want to use > code insight/autocomplete as a reference and a help to learn the API. > Then it is maybe more confusing to show something incomplete and > errornous. I observe my competitors very well (here i mostly mean Wing-IDE > for Python) and even while there system is very sophisticated i hear a lot > of comments that it is confusing. > > Thats why my in current plans it had a lower priority. But i come to the > conclusion that this is far more wanted then i expected. So i will > implement my interpretation of a good code insight system very soon. > I have now changed my schedule in a way that in 3 3 month i hope i > can come up with something but as i wrote before it will look and > behave a little bit different... Yes, I've never felt that code completion is a killer feature either, along with it being difficult to implement for ruby. Fast access to the api docs is more important because just knowing the name of a method via code completion probably won't be sufficient to know how to use it.