** Reply to message from Charlie McDowell <charlie@...> on Sun, 01 Dec
2002 15:15:34 -0800

> My very rough prototype in fact does allow that - and indeed it was one of
> the trickiest (and most
> interesting) aspects of the development.
> An important question I want to address in a formal study is to determine
> if such editing is advisable or
> will it turn out to be more likely to introduce errors.

At a minimum, I think you would need a feature that automatically displays all
source & documentation points that are affected as you edit a particular point
in a tangled source. That at least gives the programmer a sporting chance of
knowing what the real impact is of editing a particular tangled source.

> One colleague is even nervous about editing of tangled code at all given
> that you are now editing out of the context
> of the surrounding documentation. I of course think it can work with proper
> warning/support from the tool.

Even if you don't allow editing of the tangled sources, highlighting the text
that comes from the macro currently being edited in the tangled sources, along
with the current edit point, would make it far less necessary to need to edit
the tangled sources directly. This would be especially so if you had a feature
that let you click on a character in a tangled source and jump to the macro
which that character came from.

Cheers,
Tony.

PS This still leaves the question of how to get debuggers to trace errors back
to the literate line number, rather than the tangled source line number.
However, if you can click on a character in a tangled source to see which macro
it comes from, then only having debuggers giving you source lines numbers is
probably not such a problem.
====
Anthony B. Coates, Information & Software Architect
mailto:abcoates@...
MDDL Editor (Market Data Definition Language)
http://www.mddl.org/