[Grace-core] Putative Blog Posts

[James Noble]

>> 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 think that I got James and Kim to agree that the "normal case" is  
> an IDE.   However, I'm not sure if they realize the implications of  
> this!

yes - but not necessarily just *one* IDE.
We expect there will be - or may be - more than one.

> Supporting a text format for interchange and occasional editing is  
> not at all the same as saying that it will be the normal case.

No,  but people need to be able to read books, websites, emails
and to cut and paste text from there into an IDE and pretty much
have it work.

So we must have a textual format for class definitions, for example,
saying "each IDE will do this via a dialog box" and then having  
something
like a Smalltalk chunk format isn't really good enough.

> 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.

hey, that's cool...
but I don't see attaching comments to AST node to be a particularly  
big issue
(interpretable metadata annotations will be a bigger issue: and  
comments may
turn out to be a special case of those)

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

sure - or you can go the whole way towards BETA, or towards
several visual languages - where the line between the "IDE"
and the language is very blurry, to say the least.

But the catch with that is that all the other tools no longer work.
You can't get diffs (or at least not outside the IDE)
standard repositories can't easily send diffs of checked in changes

I don't know of three mainstream languages that have moved away
from a "standard" text representation.



Hmm: all of this should be edited into a WIkipage somewhere,
then scheduled for the blog...

James, who really aught to be marking, then packing,
rather than doing this, unfortunately.