Monday, April 16, 2007

czt -> community Z tools

Here's a tip for anyone who needs to put a Z specification together quickly.

Never, ever, ever, ever, EVER use CZT. It is the most frustrating, dog-slow piece of shit software package I have used in my life, without exaggeration. With jEdit it's just unstable and crashy enough to warn the user away immediately.

As a plugin for Eclipse, it starts out nice, then after about one page of simple Z schemas, it parses the buffer repeatedly on every single keystroke, even if you tell it not to in the configuration page. It throws syntax errors on things that look right according to any examples of Z I have ((i,j) of a natural x natural type referenced in an axiomatic definition).

It started out in a promising fashion, and the output through latex looks nice, but now I'm in a position where I don't understand the errors it's giving me (after the unbelievable 3 minute delay every time I make a change (ie: hit some keys)) so I can't even convert what I have to tex and work on that directly - I have to delete all of the code that causes errors as quickly as possible so it will parse the buffer successfully.

Never, ever touch this stinking pile of pain. It's just not worth it.

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