Introducing Welder

When I read Gödel, Escher, Bach, I decided to drop my literature degree and take a computing one instead to learn Lisp. That didn't happen ... I got as far as expertly and elegantly configuring a key binding or two in my ~/.emacs file while struggling with java-mode. Many years later, arc came out, and Paul Graham being who he is, I just had to take a look. Maybe I could build an online ecommerce solution with this stuff, get rich, and turn into an Angel.

Anyway, the first thing I noticed was that I didn't have an editor for arc. Intellij wasn't going to cut the mustard, I wasn't falling in love with Textmate despite those gorgeous RoR screencasts, and I didn't feel like learning DrScheme. And none of these options would give me arc-aware highlighting and evaluation in any case.

So I decided to try what anyone learning a new language should try: write an editor for it. In it. On top of that, I needed something to drive rainbow that would demonstrate easy java integration without polluting the elegance of the arc spirit. And lo, Welder was born. Welder is an arc editor, written in arc. You'll have to forgive, or at least tolerate, the pun. The name "arc" invites it, what else could I do?

Don't get excited - Welder isn't quite ready for prime-time. It's too slow to parse a file (around 5 seconds for arc.arc - 2.5k lines, 13k tokens). The slowness is in the tokeniser, so I'm concentrating my speed-up efforts there. For smaller files (~3k tokens), its performance is tolerable.

These were the minimal required features I started with:

• Syntax colouring: strings, numbers, characters, should have their own colours, and symbols should be coloured differently depending on their current bound value, if any. This way it's easy to see if a local variable is shadowing a globally bound symbol, and what kind of a thing it's shadowing.


• Paren-matching - highlight matching parentheses, brackets, string delimiters, and any other kind of delimiter that might arise in the future. Also, highlight unbalanced delimiters.


• Easy selection of forms: I'm addicted to intellij's "widen selection" - I want to be able to select the entire form enclosing the current expression, in such a way that repeated application selects an increasingly wider scope. This makes copy/paste operations a lot simpler.


• Eval: I want to eval the currently selected expression, or the whole file, with a single keystroke


• Htmlify: there's no point in writing arc if you're not going to blog about it. But what a pain to reproduce all that syntax highlighting! and besides, if arc gets its herokugarden, this might be a useful part of it.


• Configurable keystrokes for all actions


• Pretty-printing (doesn't work terribly well)


• As well as all the usual editor facilities: undo/redo, cut/copy/paste. Fortunately, java/swing comes with this kind of thing pre-packaged.

Added later:

• Font-size control - essential to demo welder on a projector


• "pop-form" - replace (foo (bar)) with (bar) if the cursor is on bar


• "push-form" - replace x with ( x) - these two together are really useful for inserting/removing a little do, atomic, time, debug or whatever you need for quick refactorings

Note the paren-matching:

And easy form-selection:

Context help for symbol under caret (help text, if present, and the help system, are entirely thanks to the tireless efforts of anarki contributors)

And the complete list of current keybindings:

Welder is still outrageously incomplete. Here are the kinds of thing I would like to add:

• Visual macro expander


• Common refactorings that are annoying to do by hand - toggle between let and with for example


• Navigate to source of symbol declarations


• Appropriate highlighting for lexically-bound symbols (I don't know how to do this when the scope is created by a macro, other than macexing everything and working backwards)


• Runtime analysis


• and everything else ...

Please suggest and vote for your favourite features!

Welder requires anarki, and is distributed with rainbow on github at http://github.com/conanite/rainbow/tree/master.