RE: [GD-General] C++ analyzers?

[Brian H. <bri...@py...>]

> Now, an uber-script that makes the name substitution 
> project-wide, rebuilds the project, and checks to see that 
> the output binaries are bitwise identical...that would be 
> cool.  I would trust that a lot more than my highly fallible self.

Other than the bitwise part, this is exactly what I'm talking about, but
as I've been ranting for several e-mails now =), a script that doesn't
know the language simply can't do it all. You can't do a bitwise compare
if you have assertions or anything else that might insert or create a
string based on a variable name, and who knows what other minor stuff
might be shifted around inside a symbol table because the symbol hashed
differently, etc. 

Java IDEs provide a lot of the stuff I'm talking about, and I'm curious
why this doesn't exist in C++ except in the crudest form (i.e. "Class
Wizards" that generate code but then, if you edit the code, you're
usually hosed if you want to use the wizard again, unless that
'technology' has gotten much better).

With a typical Java IDE you can trivially rename a method, class, member
function, etc.  and it just runs through your code and updates it as
necessary.  In fact, IBM's IDE used to prevent you from editing files
directly (!).  I don't think we're at that point yet, but I think that
the notion is completely sound.

Hell, didn't SmallTalk do a lot of this?  Kent, you reading this?

Objective-C/Cocoa/ProjectBuilder/InterfaceBuilder kind of approach the
problem tangentially, at least for GUI construction, by just hiding much
of the mundania from you, but it's not a total solution (although making
GUIs with Cocoa is laughably easy with the existing tools).

-Hook