Code assistance with GCC

[Basile Starynkevitch]

Daniel Jacobowitz wrote:
> On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 01:12:37PM +0200, Basile Starynkevitch wrote:
>> However, I am not sure to understand why Tomohiro needs to hack the
>> GCC parser itself. I was thinking that he might instead write a
>> plugin which works at the Generic/TREE (or even perhaps  Gimple)
>> level.
> 
> That doesn't make sense.  If you're doing code completion, then by
> definition, what you have now does not parse.  If it doesn't parse,
> you can't build IL from it.  A parser is pretty much all you need for
> code completion, not any of the rest of the compiler (e.g. Eclipse has
> just a parser and a syntax tree).


I agree, but I am not sure Tomohiro is doing code completion inside the 
source file (i.e. inside an incomplete source file which was not saved 
by the editor). I thought that his emacs mode was triggering his program 
(on a source file in a sane state, i.e. just after emacs having saved 
it) with the symbol to complete passed in argument.

In that case, his program has to consult the symbol tables & other 
information from a completely parsed & sane file, and this might be done 
as a plugin.

And if indeed he is doing completion an incomplete source, I am not sure 
that hacking GCC is the good approach...

Cheers.
-- 
Basile STARYNKEVITCH         http://starynkevitch.net/Basile/
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