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by lazulicurio 2420 days ago
That brings to mind an interesting idea for an IDE: having one big virtual file that you edit, which gets split into multiple physical files on disk (based on module/class/whatever). Although, thinking about it, there are some languages that would make such automatic restructuring rather difficult.
3 comments
thyrsus 2420 days ago
You've just described Leo - leoeditor.com - where you're effectively editing a gigantic single xml file hidden by a GUI. The structuring is only occasionally automatic - mostly manual. It has python available the way emacs has elisp.

Git conflict resolution of that single file is intractable, so I convert the representation into thousands of tiny files for git, which I reassemble into the xml for Leo.

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kyberias 2420 days ago
Yes! Why can't OOP language editors (IDE) simply represent the source code of classes, interfaces and other type definitions as they are without even revealing anything about the files they reside in? The technical detail of source code being stored in files is mundane.
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userbinator 2420 days ago
That brings to mind an interesting idea for an IDE: having one big virtual file that you edit, which gets split into multiple physical files on disk

If you're going to work with it as one big file, then what's the point of multiple physical files anyway? Just store it as one big file then.

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ScottFree 2420 days ago
Why store it as a (text) file at all? Why not store the code in a database? Or as binary? Then you can store metadata pertaining to the code and not just the code itself. Unreal blueprints are an interesting way of structuring code and providing a componetized api. It would be interesting if they were more closely integrated with the code itself. Then you could manipulate data flows, code and even do debugging from inside the same interface.

Yes, this is all pie in the sky stuff, but it's interesting to think about.

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pdimitar 2420 days ago
I have been toying with the idea to store programming projects in a single sqlite3 database butt never seen enough value to actually pursue it.

As you mentioned though, it's interesting to think about.

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