On Tuesday, February 4, 2003, at 01:18  PM, Stephane Ducasse wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> I'm one of the lucky guys working with nathanael here and I can tell 
> you what
> is really needed for traits :
>
> 	- a clean classBuilder (we may do that)
> 	- a real clean ***from scratch*** browser that we could use (and not 
> patching
> 	again this BAD browser)
> 	- a real scanner/parser/AST that is not buggy.
>
> Don't think that I'm too strong, I'm just right. I tried to build a 
> pretty
> printer with Squeak, nathanael patched everywhere Squeak and now we 
> are at the limits.

I've felt the need for this recently as well. It seems like reworking 
the core compiler/browser/debugger tools would useful for two reasons:

We seem to have quite a few experimental browser improvements floating 
around: StarBrowser, PackageBrowser, RefactoringBrowser, TestBrowser, 
StackingBrowser, and TraitsBrowser spring to mind, there may be more. 
It would be nice to be able to combine some of these browsers - to be 
able to do refactoring and traits from the StarBrowser for example. 
Even those "differing" browsers that can't combine nicely with others 
from a layout point of view could benefit from a common code base - a 
kind of general browsing framework.

A lot of the development tools we're building need to analyze code, 
both within methods, and across the entire image. Nathanael's Traits 
analysis tool is one example, but there are others. It wouldn't be hard 
to imagine Daniel's SpaghettiTracer work evolving into a 
DependecyBrowser of some kind. At the other end of the scale, 
Monticello could do a better job of detecting conflicts if it analysed 
method ASTs instead of just comparing source code.

So yeah, I think this is a good idea.

Colin