Language Sensitive Editors

[Richard A. O'Keefe]

Our first-year CS students use Pascal on Macintoshes.  One result of
this is that they get used to an editor interface which doesn't have
a lot of editing oomph but does enforce a consistent (rather ugly)
indentation style and does check the syntax of every statement as you
finish it.

In the second year, they use UNIX.  For editing, they find themselves
using VI(le).  This does not seem to them like an improvement.  They are
taught C in the second year, and once again, the editing environment is
nothing like what is available for Macs.

Now, I personally have been an Emacs fan for about the last 10 years,
and I'd like to say "run GNU Emacs and use electric-c-mode or whatever".
But we'd really like something less powerful and more supportive.

So what I'd like to know is
    what language-sensitive editors are available to Universities for
    use under UNIX with conventional (termcap) terminals?

The languages we're particularly interested in are Pascal, C, C++,
Eiffel, and for possible use next year, Ada and Scheme.
The cheaper the better, but we're not expecting any free gifts.
We'd be after a multi-user licence for a single UNIX machine, at least
initially.

Please E-mail replies to
ok at goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au

-- 
Should you ever intend to dull the wits of a young man and to
incapacitate his brains for any kind of thought whatever, then
you cannot do better than give him Hegel to read.  -- Schopenhauer.