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Comment by bitwize | Hacker News Reader

That's an old feature. It used to be called "ctags" and even console-based text editors support it.

Have you ever used IntelliSense?

Yes, and it's a very useful feature I haven't found an equivalent to yet, That's not quite what we were talking about though--it's far beyond jumping to the definition of a symbol with a click.

IntelliSense doesn't always work, either, at least when I used Visual Studio a lot.

Which version of Visual Studio? Intellisense in VS, at least as of 2008, is pretty much rock solid. I can't think of a time when it has failed on me.

In '03 and '05 Intellisense would intermittently quit, but start working again after a build.

I'm often saddened that because CLOS doesn't use a message-passing paradigm (and because Lisp's syntax is prefix?), doing traditional Intellisense-style method listing and completion is nearly impossible.

I wouldn't be impossible, it just wouldn't work the way a message passing language does. If you ask me the trade off wouldn't be remotely worth it.

You could e.g. have a system where write some type name (or variable with a declared type), hit a key and get a list of all the generic methods that apply.

It would be a small matter of programming to add a function to Slime that, upon typing a symbol presents a list of every function that's reasonably likely to apply to it. I think the reason I haven't seen it is that it represents a very noun-oriented way of thinking about programming. Lispers are less likely to program that way than say Java programmers, where the language enforces the style.

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