[gambit-list] man _gambit func_

Ramil Farkhshatov ramil at gmx.co.uk
Tue Feb 10 13:43:02 EST 2009


> > Au contraire.  The REPL is a development environment.
> 
> You beat me to it!  Yes the REPL is an IDE.  That's one of Lisp's and  
> Scheme's fundamental principles.  Of course it is not a full-feature  
> IDE like Jedi, but still you can get a whole lot of work done at the  
> REPL.  
Don't mix up different levels. 
REPL is «read eval print loop» that's it. IDE is an environment that can
include fancy stuff such as documentation, xref and things I've mentioned
before. 
Yes, repl can be (and should be) underlying level of IDE which even can be
just a command line interface over repl. But IDE should be a separate entity
either a library or an application.

> So even though a full-feature IDE will have a documentation  
> browser, with obviously many fancy features for browsing  
> documentation, there is also a need for the REPL to access the  
> documentation. 
Where is a reason to include that functionality right into REPL? If one need
such thing he can always use external library for it.

> What is important is that hooks in the REPL  
> implementation are available to integrate with the full-feature IDE if/ 
> when there is one.
Also, I don't see any reason for such hooks. IDE must work with
object->documentation relations.

Bloat is not only huge amounts of code, but also an assignment of
additional functionality to facilities without strong reason, a violation of
Occam's razor principle.
-- 
Ramil Farkhshatov




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