[Geany-Devel] [FT-plugins] Proposed "Features"

[Thomas Martitz]

Am 01.09.2016 um 07:47 schrieb Matthew Brush:
> On 2016-08-31 10:08 PM, Thomas Martitz wrote:
>> Am 31.08.2016 um 17:26 schrieb Lex Trotman:
>>>> I think we all agree that help of language-specific plugins is
>>>> desired/required. No need to restate "we need language specific
>>>> support" all
>>>> the time.
>>>>
>>>> We just disagree on how the language-specific knowledge is
>>>> transported to
>>>> Geany, other plugins and the user.
>>>>
>>> Well, I read your previous comments such as "But *just* the data,
>>> don't offload very specific use cases onto them" (and to some extent
>>> this one too) as saying that all the plugin has to do is return some
>>> data (tags) and Geany will take it from there and all I was doing was
>>> making sure it was clear that its unlikely that Geany will be able to
>>> "take it from there" in any meaningful way, based purely on data,
>>> without filetype specific knowledge inside Geany.
>>
>> Here we disagree. I think it is possible to extent TM/Geany sufficiently
>> to encode this information in generic ways. As an example, template
>> instantiation yields different types. TM could tread them as different
>> types. Any variable will be of one of the types, so calltips would just
>> work.
>>
>
> Let's use the simplest C example:
>
>     gint x = g_...
>
> Please describe the algorithm (just in prose) that would give only the 
> valid completions (ie. would compile in a C compiler) for `g_...` 
> without providing any impossible completions, and without knowing 
> anything about C/C++/Obj-C.

Do you suggest the completion list would only contain function that 
return gint?

This is not what I would want. I can remember function names but not 
necessarily their exact return value. It's possible (even likely) that I 
got gint wrong and correct it to glong after auto completion, when the 
call tip for the completed function tells me that glong. It'd be 
annoying if auto-completion can't find the function I want just because 
I misremembered the return type and the thing tries to be too smart.

So, as for the algorithm, I'd really stick to prefix matching, as done 
currently. Everything else assumes that I coded everything correctly 
which is not always the case. I don't want to be auto completion to be 
too smart and hide wanted functions.

As Colomban and Jiri also mentioned it: auto-completion is also a useful 
tool for correcting typos and other programming errors.

>
>>> [...]
>>
>> My TM query interface wants to return all matching tags, including those
>> found by ft-plugins. Can this be done?
>>
>
> There's no reason an API couldn't be provided to query such 
> information even from ft-plugins, for ex.
>
>    void query_symbols(criteria, out_tags_list);
>
> Geany doesn't have to know every tag in order to call into ft-plugins 
> for such query results, and can even fallback to TM/ctags if no 
> plugins support this feature. 

Okay. Might as well pass the tags to Geany in the first place but it's 
important to make them available at all.

Best regards.