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High-level languages, large projects, GNOME and the .NET controversy

Jeff Shannon jeff at ccvcorp.com
Fri Feb 8 14:56:01 EST 2002 
Jason Voegele wrote:

> Thomas Guettler <st-newsgroups at thomas-guettler.de> wrote in message
>
> > Would be nice to have the intellisence (dropdown-list if you type
> > object.) of the Visual Studio. Is there already something like this?
>
> This is really hard to do with dynamic languages because the editor
> has no reliable way of knowing the type of a variable.

Quite a few IDE's do this, including PythonWin and PyCrust.  Of course, (at least for PythonWin), it's a
text-matching search.  When you type 'name.', it will present a list of all examples of what 'name' has already been
modified with, in either the text of the current editing window, or any imported modules.  So, if I'm writing several
classes in a single file, and I type 'self.', it'll provide a list that may contain all the attributes of all the
classes in the file...  but if I'm using a newly defined attribute, that won't show up at all.  (Nor will instance
names list attributes on the class, except where they've been used with that name before.)  I wouldn't be at all
surprised if some of the various commercial IDE's do a better job of this...

But I do believe that this *is* the job of the IDE, not the interpreter itself.  The overhead of tracking
code-completion and call-tips, etc, is not needed when simply running scripts; I'd rather keep the coding-help stuff
separate from the running-programs stuff as much as is practical.

Jeff Shannon
Technician/Programmer
Credit International
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