Addendum: Future Work
Sound Change Appliers
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? MorrĂ­gan Witch Queen of New York
posts: 303
, Marquise message
Addendum: Future Work
I've also been thinking about building a UI - I realize I've said in the past that I didn't see a point. Certainly for the purposes of running rule files, a UI is useless at best, and a hindrance at worst.

However there is substantial value in building what is essentially an IDE. Even something as simple as editing a rules file with syntax highlighting1, and executing the file would be a good use of a UI. But there is a lot of potential value in building this type of platform, like:
Providing error highlighting
View lexicons loaded by the rule file
Debug rules: step through rules and see how they change your lexicon, including "before" and "after" forms highlighting the differences
Mouse-over variable in rule to see what it contains at that point in the rule.
Phonetic feature editor
Mouse-over symbol to see feature values
Dependency diagram to show feed and bleed orders of rules

I'm looking into using JavaFX for this, but admittedly have only ever developed one relatively simple MV*-like application using JQuery and Handlebars. I suspect supporting the kinds of functionality I'd like to see would require a huge amount of work, and might detract from my ability to continue some of my research efforts, but it would be fantastic to have a platform with these capabilities.

Though it will mean cleaning up the API more, but I've been working on that and making good progress.

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1. where the editor knows what symbols are defined as variables, for instance