IDE influence (was RE: [thelist] ColdFusion: Nested pound signs)

[Chris Spruck]

Ray,

At 08:22 AM 11/14/01 -0500, you wrote:
>It's interesting - the IDE influences your coding style. I wonder if
>people see this w/ other IDEs/languages?

Absolutely! My big thing is that the tag completion in Studio (or other 
apps) drives me absolutely nuts. I guess I'm usually adding to tags or code 
that's already in place and hate having to stop and delete the duplicated 
closing tag or move it somewhere manually.

I've been coding in Visual Basic for a couple weeks now and immediately 
turned off "Syntax Completion" when I ran across it being a pain. I was 
trying to wrap a Replace function around about 10 variables in a procedure 
so was going to copy and paste "Replace(" in front of each variable, then 
go back and copy and paste identical parameters on the other side of each 
variable name, instead of pasting the first part, copying the second, 
pasting the second, recopying the first part, repasting again, etc. As soon 
as I pasted the first time and clicked off that line to paste again, I got 
a pop-up (and syntax error color highlighting) demanding that I close the 
function with a ) first. Took two of those before I went looking for how to 
kill it. :)

<tip type="Running new applications">

The first thing I usually do when running a new application for the first 
time, is take a few minutes to really get to know the preferences or 
options, before diving in too willy-nilly. You'll find cool stuff that will 
help you immediately as well as find and switch off the things that you 
know will drive you nuts right off the bat or conflict with your coding 
style, like tag completion, quote formatting, bad color choices in syntax 
highlighting, etc.

</tip>

Chris