I am an old time PAW user and am finally getting on the ROOT wagon. I have been using a binary that simply runs from an Xterm under Cygwin and it works fine enough.
I was looking for an editor that highlights the parts of code to help write macros. I noticed that there is a version of the binary of ROOT (reccommmended version) that runs under/with(?) Visual C++.
My question is why would one want to use this version? The university gives us Visual Studio.NET 2003 very cheaoly so cost is not an issue.
I think I just want to have the coding editor, Dev-C++ looks ok but I am confused and need to have some guidance please.
I will be doing analysis of PHENIX data, I don’t see myuself writing standalone applications for general use, more like making histograms of particle ID’s.
Hi Harry,
in my personal opinion, the MS Visual Studio is one of the best IDEs (editor + compiler + debugger) around. I would really prefer to see something as good in the open source world, but as far as I know it doesn’t exist. So when it comes to editing C++ files, MS Visual C++ is a good choice. Even its compiler is (finally) pretty close to what the standard says, so macros that compile under VC++ will most probably also compile under e.g. gcc.
There are several pages around which explain how to enable VC++'s auto-completion for root classes, inspection of root classes in the debugger etc. You can even debug your macros nicely, by just setting a breakpoint, checking what the values of your variables are,… - right in VC++. Here are two pages, scroll down to the end: http://root.cern.ch/root/HowtoWindows.html; ask google for more.
Alternatives are the usual suspects: (x)emacs, vim, eclipse; those are a lot easier to handle (except for eclipse), but you’ll have to do some severe config hacking to make them as powerful as MSVC++.
XEMACS does all the highlighting and automatic code format/indentation one would ever want. In combo with dbx debugger one can also check break points and step through the code and look at all the variables you want easily from within the xemacs. AND it is not constrained to windows. AND it can use any compiler you wish. All configurations are accessible from menu options ( no hacking in its real meaning). And code that you write becomes really portable if it done with cygwin because none of “windows-only” stuff enters there.
AND if there is a bug: You shout at developers and they make a patch right away. .
Like ROOT team for example, they fix the bugs so promptly I don’t even have time to get upset.
.