All of this talk of C compilers and assemblers for Unix, etc has made
me want to air my own thoughts on how a development platform should be
done. It seems to me that the compiler and assembler vendors are
unaware of the Emacs editing program because, if they were,
development tools under Emacs would, by now, exist. Emacs is a fully
programmable editor and many people have written programs for it and
made them available, so that Emacs does automatic colouring, highlighting
and indenting that is specific to any of dozens of computer languages,
assembler among them.

I read and write my assembly and C programs with it. Then, no
matter what the language is, I can compile it, within Emacs with a
single keypress that is the same for whatever language or compiler I
use. The results of compilation appear in a window and I can click
with the mouse on errors or warnings to go straight to the file and
line with the error. Simulation and debugging has the same single-key
interface, one window shows the debugger output the other shows the
currently executing source code line.

The point is that all of the functions that make up an "Integrated
Development Environment" are already available under Emacs. To include
a product as part of that environment, a vendor can forget about
developing a Windows(tm) (I stuck the tm in because Don has got me
worried about Bill Gates) application and concentrate on the
assembler, simulator and compiler. There are no windows, popups or
menus to worry about because Emacs takes care of that. The only I/O is
standard in, out and error. This makes the whole package much more
portable to other platforms.

Suddenly, the Linux development tools that so many people have begged
for, would be no trouble to provide. And that opens up all of the Unix
tools like the make utility and revision control software (which could
be the subject of another overly-long rave).

Mal Goris
--
http://www.nfra.nl/~mgoris/