on 11/19/01 4:07 AM, Bijan Parsia at bparsia at email.unc.edu wrote:

> Inlining strikes again!
> 
> Turns out that pretty printing rewrites #ifFalse:ifTrue: to
> #ifTrue:ifFalse:
> 
> Looks like it actually happens as Macro Transformation, see
> MessageNode>>transformIfFalseIfTrue:
> 
> Bummer! This sort of thing is rather serious weakness, IMHO, of the
> current parse tree based pretty printing and colorizing. The parse trees
> just aren't rich enough. Having colorizing, especially, being tied to the
> parse tree just hurts since colorizing *can* preserve other code layout
> (and I know there's a package floating around for that).


We started 6 months ago to write a pretty printer based on a visitor.
So that we could have multiple way of enriching the tree. But this is not
straightforward... I hope we will came back to this soon. But for example
just coloring and keeping the author indentation is not simple.

> I guess the other bummer about parse tree based pretty printing and
> colorizing is that it makes it impossible to do these things on the
> fly, since you need a valid method string for them to work.
> 
> Makes me think of using decompilition in systems without source...you lose
> variable names, etc. It's clever but I *like* variable names and comments
> :)
> 
> There seems to be 2 and a half to 4 and a quarter (maybe more) ways of
> diddlying textual code representation in Squeak (oh! not to mention *file
> out* formats!). (I'm also thinking of things like tiles and bytecodes.) I
> know that folks have, now and again, put forth ideas for generalizing and
> streamlining this framework. I'd like you all to pipe up again :)
> 
> I'd love to be able to switch between langauges (not just syntaxes) like
> Prolog/V, or squeak server pages (themselves, perhaps further
> specializable to things like HTML, etc.; but no icky pragmas!), or
> Piccola! And I'd like these sorts of options to be able to specialize
> colorizing, pretty printing and the like in a rational way.
> 
> I have some details at least highlighted in the november squeak tweaks
> column (more HTML editor). But I just hit this and I thought I'd whine a
> bit about it.
> 
> (At least I didn't go on about wanting...well, I won't go on about it!)
> 
> Cheers,
> Bijan Parsia.
> 
> 
>