Toward a program development and documentation toolbox

...offering important and structured complements to Edit/debug, & Mlint

Description

Here I don’t provide any code (yet), but I’d like to hear your voice of feedback about what you fellow Matlab developers think.
The more you express enthusiasm, the sooner there will be actual code available for download.
The more you criticize and the more constructive suggestions and comments you post – the better it will be.

Here’s a free idea: How about a program-development blockset? E.g. A bit like the LabView stuff?
And yes, I know about ‘Stateflow’, but it is not quite the same. Or is it?

Which do you think are among the best (most useful) submissions to File Exchange that should make it into such a toolbox.
I have found a couple
e.g. M2HTML: http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/4039

It is believed that now is the time to turn the power of Matlab onto itself, closing yet another of Hofstadter’s ‘strange loops’, i.e. provide actual tools and functional help to the Matlab developers to address the fundamental challenges of their profession by ‘packaging’ into a toolbox of a set of ideas and codes. These are the product of a wide and international community of Matlab developers, but have been under-exploited and sporadic todate.

References:
Matlab file exchange
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strange_loop

(To be continued.)

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to acknowledge the following in the creation of this submission:
fparser: a pedestrian m-file parser and tokenizer, mgrep

• MATLAB release: MATLAB 7.3 (R2006b)

[Cristian Pirnog]

I'm not sure if this is what you mean by 'development toolbox', but I've been thinking for some time to write a checkstyle tool (for checking that the coding conventions are followed by everyone).
Another nice thing to have would be a better IDE (like Eclipse, for example), where one can easily refactor code (at least, rename functions and variables).
And yes, I'm also using XEmacs for development :)

[Nedialko]

Hello Cristian,
It is a nice surprise to see your note at fileexchange.
I hadn't been around here for a while, so I didn't see it until now.

My idea was to provide a couple of develop/debug tools packaged in a separate toolbox.
Some fairly unsophisticated things are surprisingly still missing even in the latest Matlab releases.

One such thing is matching 'begin' & 'end' blocks of code.
Emacs does it, but ...
a. not everebody uses it
b. it's hard to configure right for the novice

So I developed a Matlab function to do the same - it could be part of, say - I style-checker which goes beyond my ambition, but is no doubrt useful: the world is full of half-literate 'research' code, documented in 'chinese-like' Ingilish ;-)

Another very useful and yet again 'not-a-priority-for-mathworks' tool would be a good call-tree generator. fileexchange has seen a couple of really 'pedestrian' ones, whose output is hardly intelligent and overwhelming in its flow of less useful details.

Would be nice to hear from you, if ever.
Ned.

P.S. I had submitted a toolbox proposal to Mathworks. Then after a long time I got contacted by some female pencil pusher, who said that I had to register a business to be entitled support and further interest from them. So the idea fell right down the stack of my numerous priorities.