Synopsis Extend an IDE with interactive, language-specific, features (Eclipse only).
Description Meta-programs become most useful, when they are integrated with an Interactive Development Environment (IDE).
A Rascal program running inside Eclipse can get access to many of the services provided by Eclipse such as syntax highlighting, outlining, documentation hovering and much more.
Rascal uses the services of the IDE Meta-tooling Platform, or IMP
for short, a collection of API and tools to support constructing IDEs for programming languages and domain specific languages. Rascal is also part of the collection of IMP tools and (will be) hosted shortly on eclipse.org.
Using the IDE library, you can instantiate the services that IMP provides for any language implemented in Rascal.
To instantiate an IDE for a language implemented using Rascal, use the following steps:
A Rascal program running inside Eclipse can get access to many of the services provided by Eclipse such as syntax highlighting, outlining, documentation hovering and much more.
Rascal uses the services of the IDE Meta-tooling Platform, or IMP
for short, a collection of API and tools to support constructing IDEs for programming languages and domain specific languages. Rascal is also part of the collection of IMP tools and (will be) hosted shortly on eclipse.org.
Using the IDE library, you can instantiate the services that IMP provides for any language implemented in Rascal.
To instantiate an IDE for a language implemented using Rascal, use the following steps:
- Define the grammar for the language.
- Define a parse function for the language.
- Register the language.
- clearLanguage: Clear a registered language.
- clearLanguages: Clear all registered languages.
- clearNonRascalContribution: Clear all non-Rascal IDE contributions for a specific editor.
- clearNonRascalContributions: Clear all non-Rascal IDE contributions.
- Contribution: Data type to describe contributions to the menus of the IDE.
- createConsole: Create a console with a Rascal handler.
- DocumentationHover: Show documentation strings by hovering over elements of the source text in the IDE.
- ErrorMarking: Visual and browsable error messages in the IDE.
- Folding: Editors may hide (fold) certain parts of a source text based on
foldableannotations. - Hyperlinking: Hyperlinks in source code.
- label: Annotate an outline node with a label.
- loc: Annotate an outline node with a link.
- Menus: menus in the IDE can be used to call Rascal functions with source texts as arguments and source texts as output
- Outline: An outline is an IDE view with hyperlinks that quickly visualizes an outline of a source code file
- Plugin:
- registerAnnotator: Register an annotator.
- registerContributions: Register contributions to Eclipse menus.
- registerLanguage: Register a language extension and a parser for use in Eclipse.
- registerNonRascalContributions: Register contributions to menus of a non-Rascal editor.
- registerOutliner: Register an outliner.