[Haskell-cafe] To yi or not to yi, is this really the question? A plea for a cooperative, ubiquitous, distributed integrated development system.

[Jules Bean]

Thomas Schilling wrote:
> * Structural (optionally Type-Directed) Editing
> 
> Structural editing means that your code is always (mostly) syntactically 
> correct, and in case of haskell maybe also type-checked.  This also 
> implies that edit operations have syntactic awareness.  paredit[1] 
> emulates this quite nicely for lisp, Proxima does something like this in 
> Haskell for Haskell and XML-based languages.  This also needs some way 
> of incremental parsing, for which good techniques already exist[3].


Paredit doesn't just work for lisp. It works for almost all emacs modes, 
including e.g., haskell and perl (incidentally, I believe it works well 
for XML/SGML type stuff too). I use it regularly for various programming 
languages. Of course, it isn't perfect in a few respects, but it's 
pretty customisable and the author is responsive to ideas and questions.

It's not type-directed, of course. Merely structural. But that alone is 
very handy.

(Incidentally I agree with most of Thomas' points which I snipped, too)

Jules