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From: jack@cs.hw.ac.uk (Jack Campin)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Hierarchical Browsers
Message-ID: <1666@brahma.cs.hw.ac.uk>
Date: 29 Jan 88 18:20:52 GMT
References: <747@zippy.eecs.umich.edu>
Reply-To: jack@cs.glasgow.ac.uk (Jack Campin)
Organization: PISA Project, Glesga Yoonie
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>In a recent posting, I asked for (pointers to) info on writing hierarchical 
>browsers ...
> what I am interested in is an interactive 
>syntax-directed source code viewer that lets one control the amount of detail 
>visible at various levels of nesting, so that more context is visible. ...
> A (syntax-directed) viewer is presumably much simpler to write than 
>a (syntax-directed) editor, and could be almost as useful.  
>-David West    dwt@zippy.eecs.umich.edu

I have tried to reach .edu sites MANY times from here and it almost never
works, so this is going to the news ...

There are tools available for generating syntax-directed editors; the Cornell
Synthesizer Generator is the best known. The bottom of the learning curve for
it is hard work, though. (the specification language is arcane)

I supervised a student who implemented a rough approximation to the CSG in 12
weeks last summer (and did versions of lex and yacc on the way) - this was in
our persistent higher-order language PS-algol; you could probably do the same
in Standard ML in about the same time, but it would be a helluva grunt in a
glorified assembler like C. Write back (via a uucp site or nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk)
if you want more information.
-- 
ARPA: jack%cs.glasgow.ac.uk@nss.cs.ucl.ac.uk
JANET:jack@uk.ac.glasgow.cs       USENET: ...mcvax!ukc!cs.glasgow.ac.uk!jack
Mail: Jack Campin, Computing Science Department, University of Glasgow,
      17 Lilybank Gardens, Glasgow G12 8QQ, Scotland (041 339 8855 x 6045)