Hello Mirko,
On Jan 25, 2006, at 4:21 PM, Markus Barchfeld wrote:
Mirko Stocker wrote:
Hi!
First, I wanted to thank you for the RDT, they are really
great :-) Second, my question: I'm a student at the University of
Applied Science in Rapperswil, Switzerland. The next semester, we
have to do a software-engineering project (about ~200 working
hours), and I thought I could (try to) bring refactoring support
to the RDT. But I wanted to talk to you guys first, are you
already working at this? Do you think it's even doable? What do
you think about it?
I think it's great. And no, no one is actively working on it.
Of course there have been discussion about implementing refactoring
in the past. We would really appreciate if you started to work on
the issue. It is doable in the meantime: since release 0.6.0 we
have integrated the jruby parse which delivers quite detailed
information about the ruby code (an AST). We already use it for
folding and searching and refactoring would be the next step.
Although refactoring in a dynamically typed language is certainly
more of a challenge than in statically typed language, it is worth
trying. Just consider "rename method" in the following example:
class A
def m
end
end
A.new.m
I'd agree with Markus - any sort of refactoring support for RDT would
be a huge gain for our users. Just to try and temper expectations a
bit - with Ruby being a dynamic language, advanced refactorings would
become rather complex and perhaps technically impossible (to get it
100% correct). But certainly progress could be made in localized
refactorings:
- rename a method argument/parameter and all it's occurences within
the scope of the method
- rename a method within a file [without regard to other files which
may call it, or possibly variables of unknown/dynamic type who call it]
- rename an instance variable
- extract a constant
- etc.
More advanced refactorings may need to take an approach similar to
the original Smalltalk paper's suggestions. From what I recall they
implemented method renames by adding code to the original method that
would rewrite the caller's code to point to the new method name when
called. Then they ran a comprehensive test suite to try and execute
all possible calls, and then took out the old method.
Thanks,
Chris
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