Code completion and interative syntax (semantic) checking

[Daniel Engelschalt]

On Wed, 23 Jan 2002, Gregor Zeitlinger wrote:

> 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?

my main goal is to get  some experience concerning the cc-stuff so i'm
extending what is currently there. thomas schilling is working on "the
next generation  parser" which may  include an incremental  parser for
real time syntax checking (thomas ?). 
so if you have time -  you can surely help (the current flex-stuff may
be tuned, too ;) just take a look at the sources... 

bye,
daniel