It's not so much formatting aesthetics that are a concern, just that the entire program logic is contained in one huge file without much in the way of inline comments to guide you as you peruse it. In a perfect world Edsharp would become a little more objectified/incapsilated, with related classes, subroutines, etc. grouped together into leaner, more digestable bits of code. It all probably makes a lot of sense to Jamal, but we don't have the context he does as its primary developer thusfar, and so it's a little tricky to find just what to start messing with in the hopes of making improvements.
Not that I know what I'm doing, but I hacked together a perl script a while ago that basically just looks at a piece of code and outputs all the comments in their own text file. If I can't deduce what a piece of code's point is from that output, the original bit of code is not commented well enough. It's proven very useful for me, and IMO it really is true that once you've spent 72 continguous hours away from a piece of code you might as well have not written it yourself and are relying on how well you left notes.
On 11/30/2010 11:43 AM, Alex Midence wrote:
Just a question here: Arachnophelia and other editors like it include something called a "code beautifier" or "code formatting" function. I know Code::blocks does, for instance and I think Eclipse does as well. If it is a question of code readability, due to jumbled lines, long lines, etc. could the file not be run through one of those tools to separate out the blocks of code? Just speculating. I will freely admit that I don't know either c# or visual basic. I know a small bit of c++ and I understand the syntax for c# at least is quite similar to c++ with using braces and semicolons and the like. Perhaps, one of the tools used to format such code might be put to use in making this code more easily read? For the record, I too am a huge EdSharp fan. In windows, it is now my text editor of choice. I've recently been toying with Linux and virtual machines. I have Edsharp up in one window and, using the unity feature in vmware, I have emacspeak up on another window and alt tab between the two as I learn emacspeak. I take notes wiht Edsharp and plan to include them in a manual being worked on for Vinux. To me, EdSharp is the closest thing windows has to Emacspeak for functionality and productivity if you are a blind person. Like emacspeak, it extends beyond programming since I write outlines to powerpoint presentations and save them to rtf in edsharp and then suck them into a presentation in powerpoint. I write my training materials in edsharp as text files and then paste them into word for tweaking and formatting before saving them as .docx files. It saves me hours of frustration with office and other tools where I am wrestling with Jaws just during the document writing process. Slow or not at start up (incidentally, emacs suffered similar criticisms in the past), it's a great editor and I am glad to have found it. Incidentally, I find it only takes a few seconds to come up for me and that's just the first time IK pull it up. Probably five or six seconds max. Every other time, it comes right up as fast as notepad or something like that. Alex M Tyler writes: yes. Even -if- I know what I'm talking about. Have you ever bothered looking at that code? not to mention the mangling I had to do to get my startup time to decrease from 45 seconds, we're using microsoft.visualbasic classes for IO. There's little to no docs. I spent hours messing with it, I know how frustrating it is. There's a difference in reading horrible code and cleanly well-written code. But of course, I just don't know what I'm talking about and code here isn't the key. What matters as long as it works? We'll just overlook some lag that an editor shouldn't experience -at all- for startup. Hell, 3-d games load faster. But then again, experience is the key, and I don't know what I'm talking about... __________ View the list's information and change your settings at //www.freelists.org/list/programmingblind
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