From: Pete Elmore <pete@...>
Date: 2005-01-14T08:10:21+09:00
Subject: Re: Seeing a definition

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Austin Ziegler wrote:
| Not without some parsing of the text involved as it's being handled or
| parsing the definition. The Ruby interpreter discards the text
| definition of the method as soon as it's compiled.

So does Forth (sorry to be referring to such an obscure language, but
it's the only one I know of that has this useful feature).

For example, I define 'fnext' as below,
: fnext ( fib[n] fib[n+1] -- fib[n+1] fib[n+2] )
~        swap
~        over
~        +
;

Then I type 'see fnext' to see the definition:
see fnext
: fnext
~  swap over + ;
The formatting and the comment are gone, so it looks like it's just
converting from its own internal representation to something printable.

How are definitions represented internally?  What files should I look at
to see this?  Is a patch implementing such a feature likely to be
accepted?  Does this seem useful to anyone besides me?

IMHO, this would be a great help for debugging ("puts doesn't work
because this module is re-defining it!") as well as learning about the
language and built-in features.  Not to mention its effect on the size
of quines. :p

Pete
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