On Wed, May 31, 2006 at 12:19:40PM +1200, Daniel McAllansmith wrote:
On Wednesday 31 May 2006 11:32, George Beshers wrote:
Well, my thesis (many moons ago I assure you) was on syntax directed editors. I came to the conclusion that letting the user do what they want is a requirement, but that "heuristics" and other "smarts" were to be avoided on the grounds that at least for my implementation they were more trouble than they were worth. Thus I would avoid error correcting parsers unless you are very confident that the correction used is at least type-safe and that it is not "sticking things in" that are unwanted (or even more maddening removing what I just typed and which **was** what I wanted).
I certainly agree. I've ended up loathing any editor which unilaterally decides to change what I've typed. That _might_ be because they weren't done properly... maybe.
Oh, I did not mean error correcting parsers as in something that would change what you wrote, I meant ones that can deal with parse errors in a local fashion without catastrophically failing to parse the whole program. Parsers that can recover from incomplete input. parser combinators might be a better solution as their grammer can actually be guided and changed by what is in scope rather than fixed at the parser generator phase. editors should never change what the person wrote in general without some prodding by the user IMHO. John -- John Meacham - ⑆repetae.net⑆john⑈