Re: Dylan Environment for MCL

[Shannon V Spires <svspire@somnet.sandia.gov>]

> Well, I think it would involve more than you suspect.  The Dylan
> development environment is project based and keeps a database...
> ... and MCL isn't project based.

We don't need the full Dylan project/database metaphor...at least not yet.
I think if we just had a fred-window subtype that showed those outline
views of code files with twister triangles beside each definition it would
be fine right now. The file types wouldn't have to change; marks for
definitions, as well as their twist-state, could be stored in the resource
fork. It wouldn't need to be very dynamic, any more than 'List
Definitions' already is. The user could do a rescan to reparse the file
and generate the little triangles; any that were already present would
retain their existing twist-state. One level of outlining would do; we
could do without multilevel Finder-style outlining for the moment. 

And just like in the Finder, cmd-ForwardArrow would do
ED-EXPAND-TOP-LEVEL-SEXP and cmd-BackArrow would do
ED-COLLAPSE-TOP-LEVEL-SEXP. These key combinations are unused in MCL now. 

Printing could be left the way it is for now--always print the whole file
and ignore the collapse state--but collapsed printing should be added at
some point.

etc. etc...
 -- 
Shannon Spires
svspire@sandia.gov