Emacs major mode, IDEs, tools?

[Marc Ernst Eddy van Woerkom]

>   From http://www.erlang.org/faq/x617.html#AEN654:
>
>	7.7. Is there an Erlang IDE?
>
>	 7.3. Is there a diagram tool for Erlang?

Dang!, I just did a search for "emacs" on the TOC page of the 
FAQ and missed these entries. :)
I promise to read it fully after this mail session. :)


>	 The essential reason for Rose and such not looking promising for use
>	 with Erlang is that the way you model a problem in Erlang is rather
>	 different to the way you decompose a problem with OO. While you're
>	 worrying about processes, gen_servers, asynchronous messages and
>	 supervision trees the tool wants to help you with singletons,
>	 exceptions, threads and templates.

>From that UML stuff only the diagrams for packaging and those
interaction diagramms (not unlike Feynman diagramms in particle physics :)
came to mind as useful for Erlang.
The things you list seem to cover the concurrent programming part
of Erlang.
How about the functional langage aspects, is there any noteworthy 
graphical notation for them available?

What I have as learning materials for functional (Lisp - Sussman book,
Erlang book) and logical languages (Prolog - Clocksin/Mellin)
is from the Pascal/C era of the 70ies/80ies, I wonder if I missed
modern developments.


>   file), but the one time I tend to think "gee, it'd be nice to have a
>   graphical tool" is when trying to reverse engineer someone else's
>   code. 

I did my C++ work under Emacs, and used Visual Studio only for
debugging and Purify usage.

However during my Java work, at one point I switched to
use the Jbuilder IDE.
The reason was a very large bio informatics project 
and it turned out the tree view in the IDE allowed for 
faster navigation through the source tree, the
F1 context help gave easier access to the Java Help
documentation  which is a must for using the large
Java class libs.
The structure tree view that gave quick navigation to
classes, methods and fields was very handy too.
Also the search over files was easier.
Compare that to a not 100% port of Emacs to Windows.
The graphical GUI constructor/designer for Swing UI
came handy in for some easy cases as well.

At least part of this should be able to do with
Emacs as well, but honestly I had not much time to fine
tune my Emacs. I had to use what is in a standard
Emacs distribution.

>   Printing out the whole lot and spreading it out on the floor isn't
>   such a bad approach either. You can use the recently-posted a2ps
>   filter to get the keywords highlit ;-)

I know that it is inevitable to rread all sources at one point.
For now I need a quick start. :)

Regards,
Marc