[Grace-core] Putative Blog Posts

[Michael Kölling]

On 4 Nov 2010, at 07:11, Andrew P. Black wrote:

[...]
> That's the  note about comments.  It ignores the discussion that we had about attaching comments to specific syntactic constructs, rather than making them whitespace.
> 
> I really don't want to have to come up with complex rules for deciding which construct a  || (which is more graceful than //) comment applies to.  I want to apply my comments with a programming environment.

I think there is a fundamental question lurking behind this: Do we expect Grace to be written (in general) in a specialised IDE, or do we also support wiring in a POTE (Plain Old Text Editor) as a "normal" case?

(I agree with Kim's comments that there needs to be a plain textual representation, to appease dinosaurs, for copy and paste, etc. However, the question is whether we view this as standard, or as an exception.)

The decision will influence what we optimise for (even if we support both). I have a feeling that design decisions might be different depending on which view to take.

Of course, supporting text editors makes it much more general, and is the "safer" bet (avoiding criticism that would be guaranteed to come in). Assuming specific IDEs opens more design options.

For example, in BlueJ we now to a scope colouring -- see http://blogs.kent.ac.uk/mik/2010/05/30/bluej-3-0-whats-new/ , about a couple of pages down. There, comments are visually attached to methods, by positioning, as suggested here. 

However, if you assume IDE support, you can do more with presentation (animated speech bubbles!  :-) ), and especially with editing and refactoring support.

I suspect that the IDE vs POTE decision will also influence various other aspects.

Michael