From: Huw Collingbourne <huw@...>
Date: 2006-09-23T23:40:15+09:00
Subject: Re: what is the best ruby editor?


"David Vallner" <david@vallner.net> wrote in message 
news:451534D3.9000100@vallner.net...
> So, after the regular text editor plugs from people that didn't quite
> read what you wanted - more on the side of a light IDE than an editor.
> (No, I don't consider being able to spawn the ruby text debugger in a
> shell that shows up in an actual feature.)
>
> As far as I know, intellisense for Ruby isn't. To implement it would
> require a Ruby parser that's more complex in certain situations than the
> one the ruby interpreter uses.

This is pretty close to the truth. We are developing IntelliSense currently 
for Ruby In Steel. It is easy to do 'dumb' IntelliSense (dropdown lists of 
members that 'might' be relevant to the current class or object) but 
incredibly complicated to do 'intelligent' IntelliSense - that is, to supply 
methods appropriate to the current object and scope, taking into account the 
complexities of modules and mixins, access levels, inheritence and so on.

We decided at the outset that we would provide the intelligent variety of 
IntelliSense - and that has indeed meant writing a complex parser which is, 
to be honest, almost a Ruby interpreter in itself. Having done this, it does 
provide us with a huge amount of information which can be used for all kinds 
of useful operations in addition to IntelliSense (some of which we have not 
yet announced) - so, on the whole, I think the effort has been worthwhile 
;-)

best wishes
Huw Collingbourne
http://www.sapphiresteel.com
Ruby Programming In Visual Studio 2005