September 28, 2010 at 10:05 Tags Vim

I've written earlier about some problems I was having with the cscope tool for browsing Python code in Vim. Well, it turns out I was using an older version of pycscope for some reason, and the latest version actually does play well with cscope .

Interestingly, cscope wasn't really designed to support languages other than C. I've had an interesting email exchange with one of its maintainers, and I think the following quote from him is conclusive:

The program's name is "cscope" for a reason. It's not called c++scope, not javacscope, not pythoncsope, and certainly not "every programming language under the sun"scope.

Asked about the database format of cscope , he said that it's not documented by design, to make sure all tools go through cscope itself. Fair enough, I guess.

The author of pycscope , however, perused the code of cscope (open source FTW!) to understand the DB format and generate a compatible cscope.out file from his script, which made it possible to use the integration of cscope in Vim after all.