Patent ID: 8185866

Claim:
An article of manufacture for use in a computer system for providing a code assist function which suggests candidates responsive to a parsing of a partial program instruction statement, said article of manufacture comprising a computer-useable storage medium having a computer program embodied in said medium which causes the computer system to execute method steps comprising: determining a current cursor position in the partial program instruction statement; parsing the partial program instruction statement before the current cursor position; generating a list of candidates to be inserted at the current cursor position responsive to the parsing of the partial program instruction statement; applying a user-selected preference to the list of candidates to generate a suggested list of candidates, wherein the user-selected preference provides an indication of an edit syntax statement file, wherein the indication of the edit syntax statement file is selected to directly edit syntax statement rules included in the syntax statement file, and wherein the syntax statement file is used by a parser for the code assist function; displaying the list of suggested candidates; allowing a user to select one of the list of suggested candidates; and inserting at the current cursor position the user-selected suggested candidate.