This section describes the new features and enhancements in SlickEdit® Core.
A native 64-bit version of SlickEdit Core for Eclipse is now available for Windows. This version requires a 64-bit JVM and Eclipse. SlickEdit Core still retains the 2 gigabyte file size limit.
Much of our energy this year has been spent on reengineering parts of SlickEdit Core to be multithreaded. This will allow us to make better use of available CPU resources and reduce the waiting time for affected operations. The Context Tagging engine has been the focus of this work, so that we can update and read the tag database using multiple threads. Many of the parsers for supported languages have been updated to run on a thread.
All supported Context Tagging operations for PL/I and COBOL are improved in this version, with upgraded or newly implemented parsers.
Includes/copybooks are now tagged at parse-time. In order for SlickEdit Core to recognize the location of your PL/I includes and COBOL copybooks, set the macro variables def_pl1_include_path and def_cobol_copy_path to the location of your PL/I includes and COBOL copybooks, respectively.
Background tagging is supported for both languages.
A new PL/I formatting option for defining the margins of your PL/I code, Code Margins, is located at the PL/I formatting options dialog at Window → SlickEdit Preferences → Languages → [Language Category] → [Language] → Formatting. Setting these margin values will enable SlickEdit Core to accurately detect your PL/I code. If some of your source files have different margin settings, you can either change this value or add a preprocessor statement to the code (*PROCESS MARGINS(X,Y)), and SlickEdit Core will automatically adjust the margin settings for that particular file from the preprocessor statement. The default margin settings are 2 and 72.
SlickEdit Core will automatically tag all source files in your Eclipse workspace. The Workspace Tagging Excludes feature allows you to specify absolute paths or partial path components in your workspace which you want to be excluded from automatically being tagged. Available at Window → SlickEdit Preferences → Editing → Workspace Tagging Excludes.
Auto-reload now uses a thread to access files, preventing SlickEdit Core from hanging due to unavailable resources. Auto-reload is still performed when you switch applications. A future modification may involve periodically checking for modified files, but that has not yet been implemented.
SlickEdit Core no longer uses the FlexNet licensing system. We have developed our own licensing system that provides the same convenience as the previous system, while providing us greater latitude to license our products as needed. Both Named User and Concurrent licenses are supports, as before. Named User licenses continue to use a license file that is stored in the same locations as before. For more information see Licensing.