On 19 Feb 2004, at 20:33, Stuart Malin wrote:
On Thursday, February 19, 2004, at 12:21 PM, Charles Yeomans wrote:
I look at that Perl code and think "hmm, that looks old and dated".
The Rb code looks a lot like Java, and Sun has spent a lot of money
on advertising to convince me that it's the wave of the future, so I
think that the Rb code looks hip.
I am glad to hear another point of view.
If Rb can ride the coattails of Sun's marketing, that's excellent!
I think there's actually something more important in the way RB is
structured to
compare to almost all other languages.
If you look at the way projects are structured in REALbasic, they are
actually
closed to big hierarchical structures than typical programming
languages. All
your functions in VB, or Java, or C# or whatever live in long text
files, whereas
functions, properties, etc are entries in data structures in REALbasic.
This actually
gives REALbasic a lot of benefits as an environment:
1- It should be easy to implement refactoring in the future, since
REALbasic
probably has an API internally for navigating through a project using
logical
objects for each class, method, property, etc. It's this data structure
that has
enabled real to implement per-method granularity in their project
manager,
something which would be a killer feature in C++/Java land; It's always
a pain
when you're working on code, no matter the granularity, to have someone
else
have a whole file checked out that you just need to tweak one method
within.
One killer feature of Eclipse for those who've used it is its strong
emphasis on
code-management tools, for refactoring stuff.
Actually, an AppleScript API for accessing the project, or even better,
RB script
embedded in the IDE with access to REAL's project data structures,
would make
it dead easy for us to write refactoring tools ourselves.
2- REALbasic has a constantly updated memory model that is already used
for
autocompletion, but could be easily harnessed to use as the basis for a
code
browser, with hyperlinks up the wazoo to navigate the relationships
between classes.
This is a big ripe juicy fruit waiting to be plucked from the RB tree,
and shouldn't
actually be all that painful for REAL to implement.
3- If we had access to the project data structure stuff in, say RB
Script, it would also
be possible for us to write our own code for doing 'remoting' in
REALbasic. A simple
stubs compiler to produce local & remote stubs for any set of classes
in a REALbasic
would be feasible.
Of course, this is all just pie-in-the-sky futurism stuff :-)
--
James Milne
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