lets me look up standard language things by pressing L while the cursor is on a symbol like progn; it launches a browser window on the doc, and jumps to the section. For stuff that is in the code tree being worked on, there is jump to definition via tags.
> In languages with dedicated syntax for this, you can just recognize { and } and instantly know what's going on, ...
If you don't already know the construct, it may be hard to search for it, especially online.
Recently I wanted to see some examples of C++ lambdas in code bases. I tried searching for things like "[](" and "[]{" and whatnot on github; no luck.
> C's convention of MACROS_YELLING_AT_YOU.
Plenty of C macros (that do non-obvious evaluation) get written in lower case.
Even if you think you're sure something is a function call, that tells you little. You might know that it won't clobber the argument expression, but what you often need to know is what the construct does; and in the course of finding that out, you will find out whether it happens to be a macro.
There is editor support for that, or lookup methods at the REPL. Put a cursor on the symbol, hit some key.
I use Vim and TXR Lisp. This one liner:
lets me look up standard language things by pressing L while the cursor is on a symbol like progn; it launches a browser window on the doc, and jumps to the section. For stuff that is in the code tree being worked on, there is jump to definition via tags.> In languages with dedicated syntax for this, you can just recognize { and } and instantly know what's going on, ...
If you don't already know the construct, it may be hard to search for it, especially online.
Recently I wanted to see some examples of C++ lambdas in code bases. I tried searching for things like "[](" and "[]{" and whatnot on github; no luck.
> C's convention of MACROS_YELLING_AT_YOU.
Plenty of C macros (that do non-obvious evaluation) get written in lower case.
Even if you think you're sure something is a function call, that tells you little. You might know that it won't clobber the argument expression, but what you often need to know is what the construct does; and in the course of finding that out, you will find out whether it happens to be a macro.