Re: editors and factoring

[Penio Penev <penev@xxxxxxx>]

On Wed, 20 Aug 1997, Todd wrote:

> Questions that I would like to see answered. What are the most common
> types of errors that he has when coding forth. If the editor were more
> sophisticated could some of those errors be caught. Does he feel that
> context sensitive editors might be usefull.

I think that this question is beaten to death.  If the editor could do the
programming, why pay programmers to program?

>  How about the possibility of
> using a compression scheme to find common subexpression sequences in the
> code. 

This has also been beaten to death.  The answer is "Yes, somebody did it,
and it found terribly meaningless patterns."  One should factor out not
based on code sequence, but based on conceptualization, modularity, data
hiding and maintainability.  These are concept very difficult to embed in
some formal graph parsing algorithm. 

> Would he trust this to be fully automatic or more like a spell
> checker that reports possible changes.

With the current idea of putting a small number of tightly threaded code
snippets on-chip, obviously "optimal" layout and threading is an
interesting question.  But the object of optimization is a few code
endings rather that a multi-programmer project.

--
Penio Penev <Penev@pisa.Rockefeller.edu> 1-212-327-7423