Script Editor

[Alain Farmer]

Hello Sadhunathan and y'all,

>> A "best of both worlds" compromise, proposed by me
>> in the context of FreeGUI's scriptEditor, would be
>> to make the comments *collapsable*, e.g. only see 
>> them when you want to see them + instantaneous
>> switch between ... 

> Nice idea!
> Yeah, that would do it. I'd sort of like to right
> click on any line of code and see the basic
comments, 
> maybe a choice of higher levels of abstraction etc, 
> hyperlinks to other docs, etc. And of course good 
> tools to make it easy to create and maintain this 
> repository of information.

I am glad that you like this idea. Would you care to
indulge in it further? Discuss it further, map out the
design of the ideal script editor, mock it up with MC,
etc. The first thing we should probably do is evaluate
MisterX's recently crafted ScriptEditor. It would give
us a HUGE headstart towards creating/having/using the
Script Editor of our dreams, instead of just dreaming
about it (which is fun too). You can opt out of ANY of
these, of course, but it would be *great* to have your
input in this quest of ours.

What do you think of my other idea? The one whereby
the comments can be selectively filtered, according to
the profile of the user (his prefs, habits and
particular task). The latter "task-based" approach
would display only the comments you need to achieve
that task. You could have one for "learning the code
from scratch", another for "advanced debugging for
code veterans", etc.

Here's another idea that I have not mentionned yet. We
could implement HyperCard's Script Translator
interface, which allows the script and its comments to
be formatted in user-specific ways (for display &
editing) but stores the script/comments in a standard
machine-interpretable format that can adapt flexibly
to all kinds of outputs. Methinks this is most likely
to be implemented with XML, but it doesn't really
matter to any of the users because they will never
'see' the XML. Among other things, the customization
of the 'display' can include localization of the
script and the comments, e.g. set the "language" to
english, french, german, etc.

Regards,

Alain Farmer
FreeGUI coordinator

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