Am 23.05.2007 um 00:20 schrieb Ashley Yakeley:
I don't suppose you're familiar with the Dylan programming language, or more to the point, have looked at the IDE that Apple included in their original implementation of the language (around 1993 or so)? Characteristic of Apple of that time, the UI was both highly innovative and a joy to use. It was based around "browsers", where each browser had a "subject" (such as a project, module, definition etc.) and an "aspect" (such as "contents of", "errors in", "references to", "direct methods of" etc.). Browsers could be linked so that the selection in one browser became the subject in another. This made it very easy to navigate your project.
All code was stored in a database rather than as text files, and individual code definitions were separate objects in the browsers rather than pieces of text in a big file.
Info w/ screenshots: http://osteele.com/museum/apple-dylan http://wiki.opendylan.org/wiki/view.dsp?title=Apple%20Dylan Needless to say, this goes in rather the opposite UI direction to the "Ctrl-M Ctrl-Meta-Z <esc> :edit qx" approach to editors that some people prefer.
Dylan's not a bad language, and there are open source implementations available for Gnu/Linux. But if you want to check out Apple's IDE, you'll really need a 68K Mac, as the PPC version is very buggy and I don't think the 68K version will run in PPC.
Michael's blog: http://snakeratpig.blogspot.com/2007/02/road-to-haskell.html Dylan and Haskell are very similar in the multiple-dispatch (a haskeller would call that pattern matching on several arguments) respect. Cheers, Gabor PS: Btw, the Apple Dylan IDE works well on PPC if you apply a patch that was issued by Digitool shortly after the initial port of the IDE to PPC.