Re: Cluehunting: Expanding The Future

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico nuclecu unam mx>]

>  Should we place this type of standardization inside of the style guide, or
>  set up a form of "programming guide" that talks about how to implement the
>  styles, or...

I imagine quite a few functionality and behavior issues from the style
guide can be implemented into the core GNOME libraries -- if you want
completion to be available from most text input lines, it makes sense
to put that functionality in the input line widget.  I encourage you
to do so.

I also want the style guide to help programmers in implementing the
features it specifies by providing code examples:  "If you want an
entry to have completion for such and such texts, you can use the
following code snippet...".

>  First design, then program.

I would advise you to do these simultaneously; it is the way the rest
of GNOME has been written, and it works well.  It also helps avoid
having over-engineered specifications and long documents that never
get implemented.  It will also give you a good knowledge of the
implementation issues of your proposal.

>  * isn't part of regex?  Interesting point was brought up, though...this
>  isn't a great idea if it makes cluehunting much harder to implement.

Shell globbing is trivial to implement in terms of regular
expressions.  I suggest you read a book on finite automata.  I like
this one:

	John E. Hopcroft and J. D. Ullman
	Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation
	Addison-Wesley
	ISBN: 020102988X

>  >For more information about this sort of stuff, I would suggest you
>  >read the Remembrance Agent documents in the wearable computing site at
>  >media.mit.edu.  There are also some ideas you could take from Emacs
>  >tags, abbrevs, and dynamic completion.
>  
>  Yes, I've heard about this.  I need to sit down with an emacs master...

You may want to look at the Emacs Info documentation.  It explains all
of these features.

  Federico