Folding editor?

Edward P Luwish eluwish at uswest.com
Thu May 27 22:09:31 UTC 1999


Does anyone know of a folding editor implemented on Squeak or any other
Smalltalk that I can get from the archive?  If not, I have a pretty
interesting project to do, in addition to porting Squeak to EPOC32.

If you are not sure what it is, a folding editor is like an outliner, in
that you can hide subordinate data behind a short descriptive heading in
a hierarchy of headings.  Entire branches of the tree can be cut, copied
and pasted by simply cutting and pasting the root topic to another part
of the tree.

A syntax-sensitive editor can be subclassed from a folding editor.
There used to be a DEC product like this:  you picked a computer
language and the extended BNF construct "{program}" appeared on the
screen.  Each time you select a BNF construct, you can expand it into
the right hand side of the BNF production.  If the right hand side is a
choice (like "{statement}"), a pop-up menu appears with the choices (in
a C example, you would see "{if_statement}", "{block}", etc.).
Provisions are made for mandatory and optional syntactic constructs, and
those that can be repeated.  At any point you can give up and just type
something, but if you don't,  it's a nice aid for syntax checking and
consistent coding.  There's probably something in Emacs like this, but I
never was a big Emaxer. (This could be another nice project, which can
reuse existing stuff if you know of any)

I would like to have Squeak be my desktop, even if I am writing a novel
or a C program.  That's why I am interested in tools like this.
Ultimately, I want to have a whole suite of PIM and Office tools, such
as are found on a PDA or a typical WordSpreadDatabase package like
Appleworks, and a multi-language development environment.

Ed





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