On May 25, 2005, at 5:39 AM, Piers Cawley wrote:
One of the 'mental apps' that's been pushing some of the things I've
been
asking for in Perl 6's introspection system is a combined
refactoring/debugging/editing environment for the language.
Maybe I have been reading too much about Smalltalk meta-classes lately,
but in doing some draft ideas of the Perl6 meta-model for Pugs, I
realized that given a really solid class/metaclass introspection system
and access to the interpreter level meta-meta-classes, it would be
possible to easily write a class browser much like Smalltalk.
And to extend that to also be a refactoring browser would require the
meta-meta-class system to be able to generate and emit code, which, if
we properly model the meta-meta-classes should also be fairly simple as
well.
And of course all this is even simpler if the interpreter is written in
Perl6 (although the cyclical nature of that can be dizzying at times).
However adding debugging support to this is another matter all
together, and it is only partially useful to the non-OO programmer.
Anyway, just wanted to add my 2 cents. Back to $work for me :)
Stevan
