[EXPERIMENTAL!][GOODIE] HintingBrowser

Stephane Ducasse ducasse at iam.unibe.ch
Thu May 31 14:10:02 UTC 2001


on 5/27/01 11:25 PM, danielv at netvision.net.il at danielv at netvision.net.il
wrote:

> If you're planning on studying some code soon, I'd love to know if this
> helps you any, or any other comments.
> 
> from preamble:
> 
> "Change Set:  HintingBrowser
> Date:   28 May 2001
> Author:   Daniel Vainsencher
> 
> Experimental!!
> Adds hints about the contents of methods in the Browser.
> A - accessor
> S - just return self
> C - just return some constant
> P - a primitive
> a number - regular code, higher number mean more complicated code.
> 
> This very alpha code, much hackery, not meant for inclusion in update
> stream...
> Having gotten this clear, this code says various things -
> 1. We can get some information more easily than entering the method,
> especially when browsing code. The info found by this version is only
> the trivially available, we could do more.
> 2. Cute icons might be better than letters
> 3. A smarter PluggableList would be able to get lists of things other
> than texts, and display each appropriately - (not like in this code by a
> fixed mapping) maybe by asking the list items, maybe by being configured
> with the right morph Factory by the application"!
> 

What could be interesting to add is:

    - abstract methods
    - extends (overide + call super)
    - override without super call
    - delegate 

What is also a problem with common browsers is that they only show the delta
that the class is defining. In fact we would like to see the class as the
local class and its superclasses.

Inheritance promotes incremental definition but it would be good to have a
synthetic view. One problem with this approach is clearly if you take
initialize  you will have to find a way to present all the initialize
methods defined in the superclasses.

Stef





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