Using Office as an IDE (was: Making word documents machine-readable)

Ok, I admit it: this is a bit crazy. :) I think this is a very good quote:

Get your data structures correct first, and the rest of the program will write itself.
David Jones

especially in the context of this post.

That enough fluff, now let's get to the stuff.

Let's assume that you get some kind of specification in a simple computer readable format, e.g., comma-seperated-values or XML. There are several things that you can do when provided with such specification:

• generate code, e.g., interfaces or test-cases
• automatically check you code (e.g., the states of a finite state machine handles the events they should and no more)
  
• automatic formal analysis of the specification (e.g., the finite state machine does not have any unreachable states)
  
• make sure the user documentation contains all parts of the documentation (e.g., a chapter for each foo and bar specified).

Nice, stuff. But what if you get the specification in a less computer friendly format like MS Word format? Luckily, OpenOffice can read Word files and convert those to an easier format like HTML or plain text format (this should be possible to do via command line according to this, although I haven't tried it). OpenOffice can also do similar thing with Excel files.

Ok, now you've got the Word or Excel file converted to plain text, now it's time to write that anayzer, code generator, or whatever you need. Code on!

Actually, when thinking about this I realized that a very cool thing to do would be to trigger the convert-to-text-and-generate-code process when the Word/Excel document is saved. This way, whoever is updating the Word/Excel file will immediately know if the document is consistent (if the process analyzed its content) or if the tests passed (of the process generated test-cases). Would that be awesome?

In some sense, this is using MS Office (or OpenOffice for that matter) like an IDE. Sound like madness to me, but perhaps its useful someone. Although I have to say that writing some document in MS Office, saving it, and a few seconds later getting an indication saying "document analysis result: 1 warning: no test-case for feature 'Foo is sent to Bar'." would be really cool. Or when saving an Excel file getting an indication saying "Data in cell (5, 4) made test-case 'Foo can hold configured number of Bar:s' fail."... that would be awesome.
Why? Dunno, it just would. :)

Java-compatible syntax for C++

Since I first realized how much more productive you are in Java compared to C++, it has bugged me that the syntactic difference is so small. Take this code as an example:

class A {
public void a() { }
}

Is that C++ or Java? (Hint: add ":" and ";" and it becomes another language). The difference is syntactically tiny, but huge when you think of all the things you get from Eclipse when using Java.

So, this the idea: express C++ with a syntax that is compatible with Java. This Java-compatible syntax (JCS from now on), of course, requires a program to translate it to C++, but it will make it possible to use a number of tools currently only available for Java. Refactoring and code browser (which is reliable), for example.

Yeah, I hear you, "you can't express advanced-feature-X and meta-programming-feature-Y using a JCS". You're right; macros and advanced template-programming is far beyond the reach of a JCS, but that's not my point. My point is that the majority of C++ code could easily be expressed with a JCS. If 95% of your code could be refactored or browsed using Eclipse, thats much better than if 0% of your code could be refactored properly.

Actually, I think that the alot of the C++ language is an example of not keeping the corner-cases in the corner. Simple things like writing a script to list all defined functions in a source file is (in the general case) impossible because macros can possibly redefine the language... (thus all #include:ed header files has to be parsed, thus the entire build system with all its makefiles has to be known to the scrip.).

I know Bjarne Stroustrup had reasons for doing this (backwards compatability with C), but I think this was more of marketing reason than a technical reason. His new language could have been compatible with C (being able to call it, and be called from it, etc) without the new language having to be a syntactial superset of C. Anyway, back to JSC for C++.

Friends and colleagues have told me that the new CDT for Eclipse gives you refactoring, code completion, and browsing, but it works poorly from my experience. Perhaps I've failed to configure Eclipse correctly, or I'm using a crappy indexer to index my C++ code... but I can't refactor my C++ code the way I can with Java code. (Compare the number of available refactorings in Eclipse for Java and C++ if you like to have an objective measurement).

I've implemented a prototype that proves that it is possible to create a JCS that covers the most common part of C++. It works by traversing the Java AST (abstact syntax tree) and translates relevant nodes to its C++ representation. Example:

class A extends B implements C {
public int foo(@unsigned int[] a, boolean b) {
if (b) return a[1];
return 0;
}
}

translates to

class A : public B, public C {
public: virtual int foo(unsigned int* a, bool b) {
if (b) return a[1];
return 0;
}
};

There are very much that's not covered with this prototype, and it's probably riddled with bugs... but it fulfills its purpose perfectly: proving that expressing C++ using a JCS is possible. The prototype is available here.

I'd love to make a real-world worthy implementation of this idea, but I'm afraid it will take up my entire spare-time... I have other things to think about! :)