A wish: "This function is OK, do not warn me again!"

[Alan Grover]

>Jenda wrote:
>>Sometimes you write a function that is surely OK, but the compiler
>>still warns about something.
>>[..]
>>Couldn't you add some pragmas or something?
>>Eg.
>>//#nowarn
>> = do not give warnings about the next function
>>[..]
>>//#warn
>> = turn it back for this function
>

F.S.A.Zuurbier@inter.nl.net (Erik Zuurbier) wrote:
>Some more ideas for such pairs of brackets:
>1) When a programmer introduces a pair of warning killing brackets, the
>IDE could keep an extra bit of information (initially zero) in the
>program source (not visible to the programmer). As soon as the
>programmer edits the source code inside the brackets, the bit is
>automatically set to one, because the editing POTENTIALLY invalidates
>the programmer's analysis that led her to believe:
>"This function is OK, do not warn me again!"
>Then the IDE should have a menu option to remove all pragma-bracket
>pairs which have their bit set to one. The next time she then runs
>the compiler, she gets the warnings again, so she is triggered
>to redo the analysis.
>
>2) The programmer should be able to hide the pragma's
>from view, while they remain effective.

I think I'd rather see the Clean team work on the language/compiler/etc.
Mr. Zuurbier's suggestion is otherwise an excellent one for a programming
editor. It seems that programmers want intelligent editors, but they never
seem to catch on (I don't know why). VMS had a syntax aware editor in 1985
or so, we all know about EMACS, and there have been many other attempts at
things like literate programming. Yet we are still stuck with isolated,
plain-text, editors.

I have elsewhere suggested that the Clean IDE leverage existing editors,
such as Alpha and BBEdit.

Perhaps someone would like to point us to existing projects that are
working on intelligent editing? Perhaps there is enough interest to spin
off a group interested in this?

---
"Alan Grover, Technical Pb" awgrover@umich.edu
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