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Initial impressions of 0.9 release [message #1002205]

Fri, 18 January 2013 02:00

Eclipse User

First, may I congratulate the team on a slick release. The debugger integration is most welcome, and things pretty much worked out of the box.

Code analysis will definitely help peeople work with a language which can sometimes be too forgiving. For instance, it would be nice if _unknown globals_ are specially marked; not necessarily an error, but often represents a spelling mistake (if strictly controlling use of globals as is standard for larger projects). The Konecki environment clearly _knows_ about such variables.

As a user-interface thing, the 'note: this element has no attached..' popup becomes very irritating.

The documentation markup is fairly standard, although currently we need to explictily use @function tags, which should be straightforward _in most cases_ to infer from the function declaration. Many of us are used to LuaDoc, but depend on its ability to infer this, so that we don't have to keep typing out a name twice. I understand the rationale - it becomes possible to write stand-alone documentation - but that is not the usual style people are accustomed to. It is not an either/or thing.

I mention this because this will help us move large lua codebases over to Koneki without having to do a lot of doc string rewriting.

steve d.

Re: Initial impressions of 0.9 release [message #1002465 is a reply to message #1002205]

Fri, 18 January 2013 11:32

Eclipse User

I thought you of all people would look at this as an opportunity to simply have a Lua script copy the function declaration and morph it into a "-- @function ..." line.
Smile

Re: Initial impressions of 0.9 release [message #1002496 is a reply to message #1002465]

Fri, 18 January 2013 12:57

Eclipse User

Thx you guys Smile

, we need this kind of feedback to move LDT in the right way.

In the 0.8, debugging was quite difficult to configure. Make that easier was one of our main goals. Nice to see this is better now.
The next step will be to make it works for a larger kind of Lua VM (lua 5.2, luaJIT, ...).
Thx to Julien Desgats(the main lua developer of debugger).

About code analysis, this could be a good idea. Currently, LDT can help to solve this kind of error as the local variables was colored in grey and the globals ones are in bold black. But this is less visible than a warning.
I open a enhancement but probably not planned for the next release.

I open a bug for the documentation pop-up too, we will try to fix it for next release.

About code documentation, you could read this wikipage or this bug to see why we start with a self-sufficient documentation language.
It's just a begin and the next step is to go in the way you described. (see bug 381671)
We think this the most missing feature in LDT.

Hope one day luadoc, ldoc and ldt language will be compatible Wink

Re: Initial impressions of 0.9 release [message #1002746 is a reply to message #1002465]

Sat, 19 January 2013 04:30

Eclipse User

Lua Bowski wrote on Fri, 18 January 2013 11:32

I thought you of all people would look at this as an opportunity to simply have a Lua script copy the function declaration and morph it into a "-- @function ..." line.

Oh yes! Powerful urge which I try to suppress here because it will play hell with revision control. I don't mind updating LDoc to handle extended @function tag but I do mind putting in redundant @function tags in 20,000 lines of Lua. There are teams with more than ten times that number of lines so you can appreciate the problem Wink

- even if it can be done with a 150 line script. The LDT has the metalua AST available so it should be relatively easy to infer the [...] modifier.

Re: Initial impressions of 0.9 release [message #1002748 is a reply to message #1002496]

Sat, 19 January 2013 04:38

Eclipse User

Simon Bernard wrote on Fri, 18 January 2013 12:57

the globals ones are in bold black. But this is less visible than a warning.

What would be needed: (a) switch off the no-docs-found tooltip (b) mark unknown globals in a different colour. That will make probable spelling mistakes stand out.

I'm pleased to see that the classic ctrl-click works for code in other modules, although not within a program, which is a pity.

Quote:

Hope one day luadoc, ldoc and ldt language will be compatible .

Not difficult to achieve, really. ldoc is already hopelessly flexible and it would be straightforward to implement the '@param #string' and '@return #string' which looks much better than the current LDoc '@tparam string' and '@treturn string'. LDoc does support various kinds of aliases, so that I can say '@string' as short for '@param #string'. The idea is to cut down the amount of work needed for someone to annotate their code.

Of course, this is Eclipse: we can have a feature that fills in the comment block from the function declaration! That might be a very useful keystroke.

steve d.

Re: Initial impressions of 0.9 release [message #1005228 is a reply to message #1002748]

Thu, 24 January 2013 12:17

Eclipse User

steve donovan wrote on Sat, 19 January 2013 04:38

I'm pleased to see that the classic ctrl-click works for code in other modules, although not within a program, which is a pity.

I am not sure to understand what do you mean. When you say "program" it's a project in Eclipse ? Can you give a short syntax example of where you hope to see the ctrl-click working ?

Re: Initial impressions of 0.9 release [message #1005240 is a reply to message #1005228]

Thu, 24 January 2013 12:43

Eclipse User

Sorry, I was not being precise here. By program I simply meant the 'main' file of a Lua project. Actually, what I meant was that you may jump to another module, but not jump around in the module you are working on.

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