Re: philosophical question about frequent saving of files

I hate it when programmers think it's ok to overwrite my work without
my explicit decision making.

However, The best thing to do is to save the files in a temporary
location, or under a defferent name, Frequently.  Also save as much
undo information as possible.  Then when The explicit command to
overwrite the work in progress comes in, save or copy the information
to the peice.

This allows for for loss prevention and reduced tension, :)

On 8/24/05, Ivan Soleimanipour <[email protected]> wrote:
> Is it OK for a program/IDE to automatically/frequently save edited docs?
> 
> Traditional programmer editors on unix have buffers and require explicit
> saving. None of them ever instituted auto-save (that I know of).
> So by one measure automatically saving a file to disk will violate
> many a programmers expectation.
> OTOH, in order to smooth flow IDEs will most commonly save
> files to disk before doing a build w/o asking the user any questions.
> Adding in on the fly compilation, fix and continue and all that the
> trend seems to be to _hide_ the fact that there is a continuum of
>        file in buffer
>        file saved to  disk
>        file compiled to .class/.o
>        file linker into .jar/a.out
>        file run as a process
>        file as a proxy in debugger symbol table
> by that measure there should be no distinction between file in buffer and
> file saved to disk which would argue that an IDE should save anytime
> it chooses.
> 
> The practical actual reason I'm pondering this question is that
> I need the external debugger engine to detect out-of-date src and
> oobject code and one way would be to have the IDE save src file edits
> at crucial times.
> 
> Personally I know that I subconsciously save my vi buffers often and
> almost randomly apparently sticking to the second model. while others
> might be much more deliberate and aware of theur buffer saves.
> 
> This almos might matter depending on what you're using.
> Could it be for example that if you're interacting with the bult-in
> editor you have one expectation while if you're interacting with the
> external emacs/vi you have a different expectation?
> 
>