Re: [photran] RE: [photran-announce] Photran 4.0 beta 3 now available

[Jeffrey Overbey <subscribe-photran@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Dennis,

Thanks for the questions.  So far I was only aware of one or two people 
who had actually tried the refactorings!  Comments follow...

> When I tried it, it seemed to try to build the database each time, even

The program database we are using in 4.0 beta 2/beta 3 is brand new, and 
unfortunately I did not have time to add any caching before the release. 
 So it doesn't actually rebuild the database, but every database read 
goes directly to disk and deserializes some objects, which is ungodly 
slow.  This is at the top of the list of things to fix since every 
analysis and refactoring depends on it (including new ones we'll 
introduce next year).

In the mean time, the hope is that it works correctly but slowly. I hope 
other users will tell us one way or another...

I should have mentioned that in the announcement or on the Web page.

> The other related feature I'd like to see is to hook that symbol
> database into the search engine so that it can look for symbols rather

Some of our undergraduates at UIUC implemented "find all references" 
(comparable to the same feature in CDT and JDT) quite successfully this 
semester.  That is one of several features that will be introduced early 
next year.

> I did try it to rename variables, but in addition to renaming the
> variable, it removed all spaces in the modified source file, as shown

Actually, the refactorings are supposed to be disabled on fixed format 
code!  (How did I miss that?!)  For now, anyway, only the free form 
parser maintains the comment and spacing information necessary to 
perform refactorings.  Thanks for noticing!

Jeff