Cobra Forums

Hello everyone,

first I'd like to express my respect for this project. I find Cobra language very interesting. Actually really neat and promising.

My question, as a newbie in Cobra, is if there's already integration of Cobra into some major IDE. I would imagine Eclipse, NET Beans, Mono Develop or Sharp Develop could be supported. But, of course, there's more good IDEs. Any mature development environment would be appreciated.

My point is, that I plan to start develop my first own open source application soon (in several weeks or months, I am still in analysis phase). It will be rather big Mono based project integrating google maps (or some other map system maybe) with bloging engine, RSS aggregators, wiki, video and streaming server, search engine and more ...
I plan to use Moonlight interface when it will be released (should be ready in 2009).

I discovered this cool Cobra language few days ago and I immediately thought, I could (or I should!) use it rather than C# - especially because it's testing and documentation features, beauty of the code and because it is an open source.

But, as you can understand, for a project of such a scale I will need to use some advanced IDE providing me with important features like code insight, auto-completion and all that jazz. You what I mean - all that stuff that makes it possible to maintain tons of code made by various developers.
Is there an integration of Cobra into any IDE allowing stuff like this?
If not, will it be available within few months?
Or can I help developing such plug-in/add-in/module?

I noticed that some syntax highlighting is ready, but I am afraid that's not enough for me.

Thank you everyone who spend any time answering my question.

I wish the best to the Cobra project

--------------------
Karel aka lot_cz
regards from Prague

Currently there is no IDE support other than the syntax highlighting, block folding, etc. for the various editors listed at EditorSupport. As the author of the language, I'm always busy with the language and compiler itself, so it doesn't seem that I'll have time to work on the IDE integration directly. Instead, this will have to come from the community. Looking at other language communities, this seems to be the norm.

If you work on this, I suggest starting with SharpDevelop or MonoDevelop first as I think they will be easier to do than Visual Studio. Also, you could host it as an open source project on a site such as Codeplex or Launchpad.

There are some features in Cobra which mitigate the lack of IDE, which is how we manage to work on the compiler that is written in Cobra with ~ 31,000 lines.

-- "Similar names" feature means that if you get a member name wrong such as "Environment.env" then Cobra will list similar member names for you. Example: error: Cannot find a definition for "env" in "Environment". There are members with similar names including "expandEnvironmentVariables", "getEnvironmentVariable", "getEnvironmentVariables", "nativeGetEnvironmentVariable" and "setEnvironmentVariable".

-- "Correct case" feature. By specifying "-correct-case:yes" on the command line, Cobra will correct the case of type names such as "string" and "dictionary". If you can configure your editor to automatically reload files, it's quite nice.

-- "Coding for quality" features such as contracts, unit tests and assert, reduce the number of bugs in your code.

-- The trace statement is useful in debugging.

-- The ObjectExplorer lets you browse the objects in your program at run-time; also useful for debugging.

Hope that helps,

-Chuck