🚀 go-pugleaf

On Thu, 01 Mar 2018 06:24:33 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:

> Jorgen Grahn <grahn...@snipabacken.se> wrote:
>> On Thu, 2018-03-01, John Levine wrote:
>>> In article <slrnp9e76p.eu5.grahn+nntp@frailea.sa.invalid>,
>>> Jorgen Grahn  <grahn...@snipabacken.se> wrote:
>>>> That too, but I'm personally more interested in the time frame when
>>>> tools I use today were created: the Unix shells, C compilers,
>>>> vi/Emacs, troff ...
>>> 
>>> I was writing C programs on Unix by late 1975 and I don't ever
>>> remember using a program to do variable crossrers.
>> 
>> (Note that I didn't mention such tools.)
>> 
>>> Whatever it needed to do, grep was good enough, or the tag schemes
>>> later written for emacs and vi.
>> 
>> That's what I still do, 40 years later :-) Tags don't work too well
>> with C++ (since you can have a dozen different functions called foo)
>> but they /kind of/ work, and no better alternative has shown up as far
>> as I'm concerned.
>> 
>> I don't think I've seen anyone use cxref, ever.  I once saw a guy use
>> cscope, but that was just once, and I was too lazy to try it out.
>> 
>>> Before that I did use the PDP-10 MACRO-10 cref program from time to
>>> time, even though we had text editors that had some sort of string
>>> search.
>> 
>> /Jorgen
>> 
>> 
> The thing is, the compiler already has all that information, all nicely
> organized. It's trivial to generate the output. The only way to get a
> proper xref is by using a program that recognizes variable scope and
> storage class - although it's *bad* form, I think in C you can have an
> extern or static variable foo and also use different local foo's in a
> bunch of functions. If you have a program that does enough syntax
> analysis to determine this you have the front half of a compiler.

A lot of the cross reference programs I've come across use the front half 
of the compiler. But overall they are smaller, and a different tool.

-- 
Using UNIX since v6 (1975)...

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