Re: Emacs contributions, C and Lisp

[Óscar Fuentes]

David Engster <address@hidden> writes:

> You are really fast at dismissing things.

[snip]

> Thanks for the lecture.

Sorry, David. I can see how my position could be interpreted as
the one who belittles yours and Eric's work. I have a lot of respect
for what you achieved. Actually, I think it is possibly the most
impressive piece of work on the Emacs community.

At the same time, I have a bit of knowledge about the work required for
putting together a modern C++ front-end. I'm no expert, but at some
point on the distant past I could qualify as a C++ language lawyer and
had the privilege of observing and interacting with the people who
worked on C++ front-ends. Just making sense of the Standard is something
that requires plenty of work and communication with your peers (the
Standard is too ambiguous on some parts for the level of precission that
an implementer needs, so things are agreed among the handful of people
who write the front-ends and later the agreement is incorporated on the
next Standard, if possible.) And then comes the hardest part: figuring
out how to implement the feature.

Creating a C++ front-end requires years of full-time work from teams of
specialized, experienced, extremely brilliant compiler writers. Please
understand that I would be delusional if I expected that you, on your
free time and on a short enough timeframe to not lag more and more
behind the current language standard, could implement the required
analysis features for accurate and efficient smart code completion.

Sorry again for appearing dismissive towards your work.

[snip]