Code completion and interative syntax (semantic) checking

[Gregor Zeitlinger]

On Tue, 22 Jan 2002, Daniel Engelschalt wrote:
> i   have  made   some   changes  to   gideon   concerning  the   code-
> completion. because victor roeder currently has no time to check these
> i want to ask if anybody could take a look at that. 
> 
> the code can be found here: www.htw-dresden.de/~s2697/gideon.tar.bz2

Since I was using flex and bison at university I got fairly used to it. So
I'd really like to use it for something useful (we were to build an SQL
interpreter/compiler), but unfortunately exams will start soon. In March,
however, I may have some more time. But before I start, I have had a
couple thoughts about what could be done beyond code completion.

I gotta admit that I've worked with M$ Visual Studio once. But it had the
nice feature of syntax checking your code, while you were typing it. This
was extremely useful, since it reduced the amount of horrible error
messages (which gcc seems to specialize in) to about zero. It was saving
tons of time. I wonder wheater we might also be able to do something like
that. Code completion would be merely a by-product.

Since this would be some extremely useful not only for c, but also for
Makefiles, html, python: simply everything which follows syntatic rules,
it would be a pity to have it in kdevelop only.
Would Kate (KTextEditor) be the right place. I think this is the text
editor interface for gideon as well, right?
Either a new interface would have to be designed or the text highlightling
interface to be extended. 
Does anybody know how this would be done the right way (tm)? Or if there
are similar ideas in the Kate team?

Thinking about the implementation I think it would be best to have the
whole parse tree of the last few files opened in memory so that typing a
letter there would simply cause the affected parts of the tree to be
updated, which would save lots of time.

Does anybody know wheater any of those features exist in any open source
IDE that we may copy from?

-- 
Gregor Zeitlinger      
gregor at zeitlinger.de