Small wish list to eC/IDE/Doc

[Sam Hu]

Hi Jerome,

Below are my wishlist regarding the eC laguage or the IDE or Doc:
1.About eC language:strongly suggest fully support no restriction on
defining variables at the begining of the scope.This can just treat as
someone own's taste or style other than a mandatory request on the
laguage.It is not so convenient defining all variables at the begining
of the scope.
2.About the IDE:good enough,but still want a bit more:1).how about add
line number in the source,and 2).some basic format ,say ANSI format
style, auto indent after {},folding,and can save workspace.
3.About the Doc:Inadequate documentation is the main reason stop me
from keep learning this great laguage.One can not learn from begining
to the end can not write some real code.At least,would you please
write some simple tutorials on how to use some special classes such
Camera,Vecgtor3D,Light,Surface and so on .

Btw,Fyi.during the New Year of 2008,a C++ forum group (Chinese) have a
chance to interview through newsgroup with Bjarne Stroustrup,the
father of C++.Mainly focused on C++ new features in 0x and C++
future.One interestiong question is below question and anwser:
------------------------
Q: You once said that there’s a smaller, better language inside C++
dying to get out, what’s that language like, specifically? Is D it?

A:No. Nor is it Java or C#.
--------------------------
I hope he referred to eC.-:)

Regards,
Sam

[Jerome St-Louis]

Hi Sam,

I have a very strong feeling against mixed up declarations and statements, it makes for very messy code. The code is a lot more clear when you can see all declarations at the beginning of a block. If you find it inconvenient, maybe your blocks are too big, maybe you should split in smaller blocks (You can simply define a new block if you would like to define new variables), maybe in smaller functions. The idea behind this is to restrict the variables scope inside easily visible blocks. It would probably not be very technically difficult to do so, but I believe this habit (which I find very bad) started with C++, and I don't want eC to pick up C++ bad habits.

The IDE is still at a very early stage. I'm glad you find it good enough. It will be improved, and most of what you're asking for has been planned for some time. What do you refer to by "ANSI format style" ? By the way, workspaces do get saved already, including the list of opened files. Maybe you're referring to the window layout positions? These need a bit of work.

About the documentation, I think the language itself is documented well enough in the Tao. The missing documentation is mostly for the Ecere runtime library API, which I will explain the next Tao chapters... But at the moment you can learn by example with all the samples. There are very simple and easy to follow samples discussing all these 3D classes you're mentionning, for example the "Test3D" sample, and the bigger "Chess" sample. Have you taken a look at it? I'm also encouraging people to help filling up the API documentation in the API Reference tool (Then we can simply exchange the ecere.ecDoc file which I can merge together). I'm also available to answer any questions you have about these 3D classes. The Surface class is quite self-explanatory. You can look it up in the API Reference and see all the methods it has. You receive a Surface by overriding the OnRedraw method of any window class. From the Surface object you can simply call its methods such as DrawLine, Blit, Area, Rectangle, etc.

 

I doubt Bjarne referred to eC ;)

Cheers,

Jerome