Hey,

Can I use a different IDE for RobotC? Visual Studio?

Benton

No, you can't.

but you can use another editor that you love, and then compile from RobotC.

Best regards
Miki.

Yeah, but I think that that would probably be more trouble than it's worth.

I wonder how much trouble it would be to write an Eclipse plugin for ROBOTC...

I do not see anything in the docs (maybe I missed it) were there is a command line option to compile. It may not be hard to add an option to do this, and if enough asked for it, I suspect they may be willing to add one.

But I also wonder how many would really want this. The current version of eclipse with the current version of Java can not even edit files properly on windows. It displays incorrectly and as you type, you are really overlaying a different line that is not even shown. Apparently this is a problem caused by the recent update to Java, but with errors like this getting through, why would anyone want to use it?

For now, you can edit in Visual Studio, with no completion assistance, then reload in RobotC to compile. Even though I have used visual studio for ever (it seems), RobotC is not as bad as other NXT IDEs, you get used to it. It would be nice if they used something like AvalonEdit (part of http://sharpdevelop.codeplex.com/), but that would require them to open source it, or write their own equivalent (several man year effort $$$).

I'd vote first for pointers.

I agree that the ROBOTC IDE is probably the best one for working ROBOTC, as it's so integrated, and its only function is to support the language. I don't have anything against it. I was just wondering about the possibility of a plugin. What do you have against Eclipse? It's used by a plethora of professional companies. And it'd be great for file management of drivers and external libraries.

I have had many bad experiences with Eclipse. From losing days of coding, to losing days of coding - well I guess just the same experience many times, every time. I do not use it professionally. I use it once in a while which means I grab the latest Java and Eclipse. It it has screwed me over every time. If I used it professionally I am sure I would get to a point where it was working and leave it alone. This experience also reflects what every person I know has experienced with it. They will not use it for their work because of its buggyness. I'm sure there are a lot that use it all the time, but my personal experience is to stay away from it. BTW, I just tried intelliJ as an alternative and so far no problems.

But again, my point is that if enough people ask, RobotC might listen and add command line abilities. Until then, the odds of an Eclipse plugin are not very good. And even if, it would take a pretty good extra effort to get things like auto-completion to work ( a new symbol table would be required from recompiling on every character change). And a huge effort for debugging. I just do not see the demand justifying the effort. The effort could be spent on making requested changes to the RobotC IDE. What kind of things do you see in Eclipse that RobotC could add? You mentioned file management, I'm not sure what RobotC is missing there, but I haven't done much with driver libraries yet.

The command line interface feature has been asked many times in the past and it's currently not a priority, as far as I am aware of. There are 100s of features that are much higher on the list. I would not be holding my breath for it, if I were you.

- Xander

Oh, I'm sure this is way, way, way down on the list is it's even being considered. We're still waiting for actually relevant things like re-entrant functions, pointer support, (and file IO on the Cortex).

Pardon my ignorance, RobotC is the only text language I've ever used. What are "re-entrant functions" and "pointers"?

A reentrant function is a function that can be called multiple times, from different tasks or from within itself, through recursion, without getting conflicts between the local variables that are used in that function.
A pointer is like a variable, except instead of holding a value, like 0 or 8 or something, it holds the memory position of another variable. So think of it as directions to another variable, rather than the variable itself.

- Xander

I know what recursion is. I'd just never heard it called "re-entrant" before.

Ohhhh.... I think I get it. That sounds usefull!

As Xander said, a recursive function isn't the same this as a re-entrant function. A function must be re-entrant to be recursive, but it doesn't need to be recursive to be re-entrant.

This is a recursive function:


This is a function which behaves in re-entrant manner without being recursive: