Graphical Source Code Editors

I want to eliminate some confusion in my earlier post about source code editors becoming more graphical. Michael Teper said that I went off the deep end.

By graphical, I don't mean any UML, flow chart or diagrammatic view with drag and drop. It's still a text editor, in the sense the Word or PageMaker or FrontPage is a text editor.

Such graphical editors won't actually appear much different from text editors; they may even look the same as text editors, with some differences.

• Block orientation. Code will be block oriented rather than line oriented. Think of each code block (preceded and followed by a curly brace) as behaving like a table cell. Navigating out of a block may done through cursor keys. In this situation, a block would alway have a ending curly brace, even if the curly braces don't show. When a block is created, it exists in full form, not like the situation in regular text editing where an open brace may not have yet been closed by an ending brace; this is because the block exists as a fully constructed object in memory, which is being rendered in the view.

public class Program
	int main (string[] args) Console.Write("Hello world"); return 0;

• Dynamic code formatting. No more worries about indentation, semicolons, etc.
• Optimized presentation.  The expression 1/2 may display vertical in fractional form.

This article on SCID explains the concept much better than I could.

The best parallel of this is HTML editing, which can have both a design and a code view, except that HTML was always intended for presentation. Design mode is the graphical view, and it always produces syntactically correct HTML. It also provides higher-level services, and, by changing the CSS it refers to, one can actually change the appears of HTML in design mode.

Comments

[Jeff Atwood]

http://mindprod.com/projects/scid.html

In all seriousness, that is one of the ugliest web pages I've seen in a while. It looks like a developer's idea of good graphic design, which is invariably a total disaster. I don't know how seriously I can take comments on presentation from a page like that. Really hideous.

If you are letting developers make graphic design decisions, you are in big trouble, and probably deserve what you get. And I say that as a developer who has been put in that position many times..

[Wesner Moise]

While I admit the site is ugly, lack of graphical skill doesn't necessarily imply that one's ideas are of poor quality.

[Jonathan]

Or you could just use Python and not have to worry about those ugly braces right now. :)

[RebelGeekz]

You mean something like this ?

http://geekswithblogs.net/rebelgeekz/archive/2004/03/02/2500.aspx

[Jeff Atwood]

"While I admit the site is ugly, lack of graphical skill doesn't necessarily imply that one's ideas are of poor quality."

I agree, but I am not confident that the rest of the world feels the same way. And the topic is, really, about the quality of visual presentation, so I think it is relevant in this case.

It's the same reason I can't take advice on an exercise regimen from Steve Ballmer. ;)

[andrew morton]

Wow Jeff, way be a dick *and* miss the point. Once you've abstracted away from bare text you can format it however you like. You could even hire an artist to do it for you.

[praveen]

i want to know syllabus for SCJP1.4 or SCJP1.5 exam ..can any body post it to my mail id praveengadam@gmail.com