On Fri, 30 Jun 2006 15:05:04 +0200, "Damien Cassou" damien.cassou@laposte.net said:
... But we are working with a live system with classes and their instances. It may be interesting to look at the instances of a given class and then get the type of the instance variable you want. If there are multiple instances of the class, we have to merge the results.
Is it a good idea ?
Yes, it's easier to implement, at least. Vassili Bykov wrote exactly such an instance-based inferencer (or "type collector") for Squeak, and I included it in my Whisker browser so that it shows the types for instance variables in the browser when it can. See the Whisker Browser on SqueakMap, or at http://www.mindspring.com/~dway/smalltalk/whisker.html . (Better to use with 3.8 at the moment... I need to put out the 3.9-compatible version soon.)
See the "Whisker-VB-Type Collector" category for the implementation of the type collector.
- Doug