Talk:History behavior

--Ericb 17:23, 27 March 2007 (CEST): One thing that I don't like with the history mechanism in EiffelStudio and other tools is that it's not always the oldest item which is removed from the list. Let's consider that I looked at classes A, B , C, D in that order. The history will look like that:

A B C D
      ^

If I then go backwards to look at B again (using the history navigation means):

A B C D
  ^

and then decide to look at class E, then C and D will be removed from the history, even though I looked at them more recently than A:

A B E
    ^

I find this situation very annoying. In a tool that I wrote, I implemented a history mechanism where only the items to the left of the history (i.e. the oldest) are removed. It is probably not a standard behavior, but I find it more convenient. It works as follow. Let's consider that I have:

A B C D
  ^

and want to look at class E, then my history will look like that:

A C D B E
        ^

B has been moved forward because that's the class I was just looking at, and then E has been added. That way I don't lose C and D, they are still in the history, still accessible using the history navigation means. Likewise, if I then drop class C in my tool, the history will look like that:

A D B E C
        ^

I find it more convenient than:

A C D B E
  ^

because C is really the most recent class that I looked at.