True, but that could be argued to be Emacs-as-IDE. Cscope enables a better solution to this problem (with a clumsy interface) but solving it for good would require solving the structured-data-on-the-Unix-streams-model problem and I've yet to see a good solution to that.
People kludge them to fit all the time—look how older ctags implementations worked, after all—but it reminds me of a guy I who would write paragraphs so that each sentence had its own "line" and relied on implicit word wrap in LaTeX, HTML and the like to format it for human consumption. He did this so it would work better with tools like diff, patch, and version control in general. I thought "hey, worth a shot", tried it, and found it too clumsy for me during the writing process and abandoned it soon after.
People kludge them to fit all the time—look how older ctags implementations worked, after all—but it reminds me of a guy I who would write paragraphs so that each sentence had its own "line" and relied on implicit word wrap in LaTeX, HTML and the like to format it for human consumption. He did this so it would work better with tools like diff, patch, and version control in general. I thought "hey, worth a shot", tried it, and found it too clumsy for me during the writing process and abandoned it soon after.