4 ms·

Can you explain it? For instance in IntelliJ I can refactor and have it automatically replace only instances of the word "call" that are actually invocations of

Can you explain it? For instance in IntelliJ I can refactor and have it automatically replace only instances of the word "call" that are actually invocations of the function call(). That's structured editing, not text-based.

didibus 9y ago
Yea, that's true, but your editor pane is a text editor non the less. The refactoring in this case is structured, even more so, its semantically accurate to a specific language. But your editor isn't. A structural editor does not allow you to make edits that would go against the syntax rules of your language.
- dmitriid 9y ago
  > your editor pane is a text editor non the less And the editor pane with paredit somehow becomes a magical structural editing machine? Paredit knows exactly zero things about your code. The only thing it can do is match brackets/parentheses and move code between them. That's it. In an actual code editing tool that actually understands code structure and semantics, I can: - select and move semantically and structurally valid blocks of code - extract parts of code into a separate variable - extract parts of code into a separate function - extract parts of code into a separate module - safely rename variables and functions across multiple files - simplify/split/extract/generify code - ... many more ...
- jyounker 9y ago
  I'd argue that IntelliJ is a structured editor. If you look under the hood the entire system is build around a tree-representation of the code. The "text editor" is a thin varnish on top of that syntactic representation.
- lazyasciiart 9y ago
  It sounds like you're saying a tool can only be a structural editor if it doesn't do anything else. I want an editor that can operate structurally AND as a text editor - I don't write new code as syntactically complete units in one keystroke.

4 ms·

Can you explain it? For instance in IntelliJ I can refactor and have it automatically replace only instances of the word "call" that are actually invocations of

by lazyasciiart 9y ago

didibus 9y ago
Yea, that's true, but your editor pane is a text editor non the less. The refactoring in this case is structured, even more so, its semantically accurate to a specific language. But your editor isn't. A structural editor does not allow you to make edits that would go against the syntax rules of your language.
- dmitriid 9y ago
  > your editor pane is a text editor non the less And the editor pane with paredit somehow becomes a magical structural editing machine? Paredit knows exactly zero things about your code. The only thing it can do is match brackets/parentheses and move code between them. That's it. In an actual code editing tool that actually understands code structure and semantics, I can: - select and move semantically and structurally valid blocks of code - extract parts of code into a separate variable - extract parts of code into a separate function - extract parts of code into a separate module - safely rename variables and functions across multiple files - simplify/split/extract/generify code - ... many more ...
- jyounker 9y ago
  I'd argue that IntelliJ is a structured editor. If you look under the hood the entire system is build around a tree-representation of the code. The "text editor" is a thin varnish on top of that syntactic representation.
- lazyasciiart 9y ago
  It sounds like you're saying a tool can only be a structural editor if it doesn't do anything else. I want an editor that can operate structurally AND as a text editor - I don't write new code as syntactically complete units in one keystroke.