[sc-dev] Cross-platform IDE things: "Document" as the home of IDE awareness

["Dan Stowell" <danstowell@xxxxxxxxx>]

Hi -

There's been some discussion about cross-platform-ness. Specifically,
the primary home for crossplatform awareness is the Platform class
(osx/windows/linux) but there's been some concern because now the
choice of IDE (cocoa/emacs/vim/eclipse/psyco) is more and more
independent of platform choice. Someone suggested we should create a
new "IDE" class or some such, to encapsulate this knowledge.

I just noticed that Document already is the home of IDE awareness.
Document.implementationClass tells us if we're using CocoaDocument or
ScelDocument. I've added a rudimentary PsycolliderDocument class. We
could create an EclipseDocument class and a VimDocument class
(eventually, these classes will do useful things).

So we could make the Document class do similar things as the Platform
class, e.g. the rather nice Platform:case functionality. At its most
basic this would look like...

	*case { | ... cases |
		^implementationClass.name.switch(*cases)
	}

...and would give us a syntax like...

Document.case(
    \CocoaDocument, { "I like SuperCollider.app best".postln },
    \ScelDocument, { "I like emacs best".postln }
);

...but that syntax is a little graceless, so maybe better would be to
add a class variable "ide" to each Document subclass with a nicer
value such as \cocoa, \emacs, \psycollider, \eclipse. The syntax would
look more like

Document.case(
    \cocoa, { "I like SuperCollider.app best".postln },
    \emacs, { "I like emacs best".postln },
    \eclipse, { "Real coders use eclipse".postln }
);

There are a couple of things in the class library that already need to
account for choice of IDE. This would streamline that business IMHO.

I propose to commit this added functionality to Document and subclasses.
Let me know if there's something I haven't accounted for... (I bet there is...)

Dan
-- 
http://www.mcld.co.uk

_______________________________________________
sc-dev mailing list

info (subscription, etc.): http://www.beast.bham.ac.uk/research/sc_mailing_lists.shtml
archive: https://listarc.bham.ac.uk/marchives/sc-dev/
search: https://listarc.bham.ac.uk/lists/sc-dev/search/