weiner@novavax.UUCP (Greg Horne) (02/23/90)
I have a simple way that ISE could improve the utility of their toolset without doing much work. They should simply unbundle much of the features of their eb browser and provide them as individual UNIX-type filter programs. This would allow others to easily build the custom tools that they want that ISE does not have the resources to provide. Example filters that basically should just list a single item per line with no other formatting include: parents ancestors (already available but I'm not sure of the output format) children heirs attributes routines features deferred (lists deferred routines from a class) once (lists once routines from a class) creators (lists creator routines from a class) invariants All of these should include options which list only those things lexically included in a class source text or the full inheritance expansion of the class (as performed by flat). Another useful option would be to simply provide a count of the desired items rather than the items themselves. And please, for God's sake and mine, don't make tools (like flat and short) by default place those annoying OPTIONAL trailer comments after all of the 'end' clauses of a class. Make this an option (isn't that what optional means?) that one must turn on. I work very hard to not insert such comments (for readability and maintainability reasons of my own) and then I find that the standard Eiffel documentation tools put them in against my will. I thought dictatorship was on the decline throughout the world :-) One last request. The troff typesetting features of short are useful but why shouldn't they be applicable to a raw class text in addition to its interface specification? Just create an option or another filter which does the same thing but leaves all of the source text there. These ideas seem obvious to me but judging from the fact that the Eiffel community has lived without them for a number of years, I thought I would post them in case they are not such obvious needs to ISE or other Eiffel users. -- Bob Weiner, Motorola, Inc., USENET: ...!gatech!uflorida!novavax!weiner (407) 364-2087