VMD-L Mailing List

From: John Stone (johns_at_ks.uiuc.edu)
Date: Wed Feb 08 2006 - 17:34:53 CST

Hi Nuno,
  It sounds like most people are just using editors for this purpose.
Believe it or not I still do most of my programming in a plain
non-syntax colored implementation of 'vi', even for multi-thousand line
pieces of code (C/C++/Tcl, etc..). I think that with Tcl you've got an
unusual case in that it's possible to write syntactically bad code and not
realize it as the Tcl interpreter doesn't even look at the code until it
actually gets run. I've had bad code in scripts that didn't get found until
much later for this reason. So, in the case of Tcl in particular, a syntax
highlighting editor is probably a very good idea, as it may help catch some
of that sort of thing before you even try to run it. With C/C++ it's not
as big of a problem since a syntactically invalid piece of code won't make
it past the first compilation attempt. I think you'll be fine with doing
big pieces of Tcl if you use a decent syntax aware editor.

  John Stone
  vmd_at_ks.uiuc.edu

On Mon, Feb 06, 2006 at 07:13:06PM -0000, Nuno R. L. Ferreira wrote:
> Hi *
>
> Need some advice on this, folks.
> Do you guys use any special application to write the tcl scripts (code
> checker, debugger ...)?
> Or is it enough to use a simple editor (like xemacs, Kwrite, nedit) that
> highlights the tcl commands?
>
> Probably if the script is small, an editor is enough, but we never now,
> since the package could grow into several hundreds of lines.
>
> Best,
> Nuno
>
> ######################################
> Nuno Ricardo Santos Loureiro da Silva Ferreira
> Departamento de Química
> Faculdade de Ciências e Tecnologia
> Universidade de Coimbra
> 3004-535 Coimbra - Portugal
> Fax: +351 239 827703 - www.biolchem.qui.uc.pt
> ########################################
>
>
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-- 
NIH Resource for Macromolecular Modeling and Bioinformatics
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
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