More Progress on Code Lookup

I finally came upon a term for the new Paladin feature that I've been doing R&D on the last couple of weeks: Code Lookup, which will look up code definitions for enumerated types, methods, and more using a database from header files. I'm getting better at hacking Lua, though I would still call myself a novice. I rewrote the parser using a more structured, less hackish approach, and I've managed to make it work pretty well. Considering that I've never delved into this particular realm of computer science before, I'd say that I did OK. It sits on top of the luasql engine at the moment, which needs some more work. Once I've gotten it working properly under Ubuntu, I'll be migrating the project to Haiku. From there, integrating Code Lookup into PalEdit shouldn't be too difficult. I'm not wild about adding more dependencies, but I can easily see greater use of Lua with the Paladin suite because of its flexibility and ease of integration with C/C++. I can't wait until this gets to the point where I can use it under Haiku.

Libcharlemagne, Lua, and Haiku

The last couple of weekends I've taken a little time away from writing lessons to find some much-needed refreshment in coding. The target? Lua, oddly enough. I twiddled with it for a while and discovered that as scripting languages go, I have to jump through fewer hoops to get something quick-and-dirty done with Lua than others and the code isn't write-only like Perl.

The first project was a doozy: write a C++ header parser and (later on) dump the parsed C++ information into a SQLite3 database so that I have the hard stuff done for implementing something code completion for Paladin. Code completion has been #1 on my hit list of features for a long time now, but I haven't had a clue where to start to implement it, and ctags sure didn't seem to be a step in the right direction. I've learned enough about Lua to really like it and want to eventually put together an elegant implementation of the Haiku API via libcharlemagne. I haven't gotten to more advanced topics like metatables and such, but I'm pretty sure that the rest will come in time. Once I finish cleaning up PalEdit's internals like I was working on last summer, I can easily see embedding Lua scripting into it for more powerful editing features and plugins.