RE: Matthias Ettrich on (X)Emacs - 'Too slow'

Well, JDEE http://jdee.sunsite.dk/ (Java Development Environment for Emacs) offers code completion for Java. Xrefactory http://www.xref-tech.com/xrefactory/ (proprietary) offers code completion for C and Java. JDEE uses a combination of Semantic (lisp) and Java to do the parsing. Xrefactory uses C. So, it's proven to work for Java and C. C++ is much more complicated to parse, of course, but it should be no more or less difficult to do for Emacs as for any other IDE. As you pointed out, it doesn't have to be written in Lisp, if Lisp is too slow. It should be possible, it seems to me. Steve Molitor smolitor(a)erac.com -----Original Message----- From: Steven T. Hatton [mailto:hattons＠bellatlantic.net] Sent: Monday, February 18, 2002 10:26 AM To: xemacs(a)xemacs.org; xemacs-beta(a)xemacs.org Subject: Matthias Ettrich on (X)Emacs - 'Too slow' This is something I read a while back, and have never been able to address.: "Favorite editor? Hard to say. I'm mostly using XEmacs and it's quite ok. But it's not my favorite. It lacks very useful editing features known from MS-Windows IDE's, like showing a function's arguments when typing a call in the code. This requries profound C++ parsing and understanding in real-time, nothing you can do fast enough in lisp, unfortunately. So eventually, we have to replace Emacs with a K-Tool, I guess." - Matthias Ettrich http://www.kde.org/people/people.html His desire for code completion, etc., is absolutely valid. His statement regarding its not being a realistic goal for (X)Emacs, from my, less than expert, perspective, is not correct. There are two reasons I say this. The first is, it's based on the state of the technology at the time the statement was made. The speed of computers continues to increase, so speed may become less of an obsticle. The second reason is that (X)Emacs can be augmented by C(/C++?) to provide the speed needed. I am not an expert programmer. (I'm the guy the coders call when they can't get their code to talk to the MySQL socket, and they've checked everything they know how.) Any thoughts on this? Steven