[Beowulf] Re: Religious wars

[Jim Lux]

At 09:50 AM 7/21/2008, Perry E. Metzger wrote:

>Jim Lux <James.P.Lux at jpl.nasa.gov> writes:
> >> I like line numbers to help me figure out if I have a really long
> >> line of text.  Most text editors do a poor job of handling this
> >> case, happily wrapping it, without telling you, so your key
> >> navigation across the long lines looks really funky.
> >
> > Line numbers are handy when you get that
> >
> > "syntax error in line 34 of file xyz.c"
> >
> > too..
>
>Both emacs and vi will display line numbers if you ask them.
>
>Emacs has a really nice compile mode where it will compile in a second
>window, and jump right to every line in the source files that caused
>an error in sequence as you ask it. (It even accounts for line changes
>because of edits.) BSD Unix has a command called "error" that does
>something similar for you if you are using vi. (I don't know why it
>doesn't seem to be in most Linuxes, but it is open source and trivially
>ported.)
>
>Thanks to such tools, no one with a real editor need ever find lines
>with problems by hand, which means that although both editors will
>show you line numbers, you don't really need them.


A lot of "lightweight" non-IDE development environments for embedded 
systems tend not to provide this, particularly if you're using some 
form of cross compiler/cross assembler.  Sometimes, you're thankful 
that you have a compiler at all, much less whether it happens to be 
well integrated with an editor.

And, of course, "open source and trivially ported" still means 
there's non-zero work in getting it working.

Jim