new ideas for improving KDevelop

[Ishan Jayawardena]

Hello everyone, I'm a newbie to KDE development and I have some ideas
to develop some functionality to improve KDevelop. But I have some
questions to be asked before everything and I expect your help.

my ideas:
1) adding a "live parser" for KDevelop
2) adding an 'code formatting engine' for KDevelop
I need them to be added not as plugins.


I will explain these two at the end of my mail. But I have some more
problems regarding development.
1) Should I develop above extensions for KDevelop4?
2) Should I use KDevelop4 in my development?
3) I have an old machine with 256MB RAM, 800MHz, but enough disk
space. Will I be able to build KDevelop on my machine?
4) Should I have a thorough knowledge about Qt and any other matter?
5) How can I test my system ?
6) How to select the module that I have to work with in KDevelop
source code and is it possible to develop that module independent of
others?
If you have any other details that I should know please let me know.

This is the explanation of my ideas:
1) Live parser
         when the live parser is active, you get your code highlighted
when you commit an error. For example; if your syntax is incorrect, if
you include a not existing header file, if you type bad code (i.e
something like 'if (i = 5)'), if you do not use a declared variable,
if you are going out of array bounds, the line gets highlighted or
underlined, and once you move your mouse over that region, a tooltip
appears describing the error.

I am trying to make these systems as extendable as possible. So we
could plugin different languages easily and upgrade existing versions,
etc and I'm thinking about more features to add in.


2) formatting engine
          By using this engine we can let the user to define his own
formatting style for different programming languages, and even
multiple styles for a same language. It has additional functionalities
like auto indentation, adding comments anywhere we want by a key
stroke, moving through block of code (as in emacs), and enabling emacs
style key strokes within editor window.

for an example if you type (suppose you have define a style to work in
the following way)

"if (var) {  <Return>"

what you will see is

"if (var) {
   | <== the cursor moves here
}"

and after you are done inside the block, once you press the key stroke
to "go outside the block" the following is what you will see

"if (var) {
   // code
   // more code
}
| <== the cursor moves here
"
So these are my ideas. I hope you would reply me soon.